Click
to review the Feature Analysis to find out how RepliWeb R-1 can easily replace
Microsoft Site Server publishing functionality.
|
|
|
|
06.03.03
By Brien Posey
Perhaps no problem plagues the Internet as deeply as that of unsolicited junk
E-mail, or SPAM. While there’s no doubt that SPAM can be annoying to the end users,
SPAM can cause problems for both the network administrators and for those who
own or manage a company. The reason for this is that SPAM robs your company of
productivity and of system resources.
SPAM and Backend Mail Systems
First, let’s take a look at the system resource that are consumed by SPAM. Any
time that an E-mail message is sent to someone in your organization, the message
must first pass through your organization’s Internet connection and through the
firewall before reaching your Exchange Server. Regardless of how much bandwidth
your organization may have, there is a finite amount of data that the Internet
connection can handle in a given amount of time.
|
This means that if your organization is using their
Internet connection at or near its total capacity then any time you receive a
junk E-mail message, other legitimate messages are kept waiting until bandwidth
becomes available. Once a message passes into your organization, it must pass
through your firewall, which then hands the message off to the appropriate Exchange
Server. Both the firewall and the Exchange server use CPU cycles and memory when
processing the message, resources that would be better used elsewhere. Keep in
mind that each E-mail message that your organization receives consumes a tiny
amount of resources such as bandwidth, memory, CPU cycles, etc. Most organizations
would never even notice the impact caused by receiving a few junk E-mail messages.
The real problem is caused by the sheer volume of junk mail that pours into many
organizations. Before I implemented SPAM protection in my own organization, I
was receiving more junk messages than legitimate messages; upward of 200 junk
messages a day. When an organization is plagued by excessive SPAM, disk space
on the Exchange Server also becomes an issue. To most people, the idea of storing
SPAM is absurd. However, a recent IDC report estimates that 44% of users retain
E-mail messages for a year or more. Even if your users aren’t storing SPAM, Exchange
is designed to retain deleted items for a period of time. Therefore, those SPAM
messages that your users are deleting are still stored on the server for a period
of time.
Resources
for System Administrators |
SPAM and Employee Productivity
SPAM not only impacts the back end information systems, it can lead to a loss
of productivity as well. The most obvious way that productivity is impacted is
that if users are busy deleting junk mail then that’s basically wasted time in
which nothing productive is being accomplished. Furthermore, if a user is constantly
flooded with SPAM, then there’s a good chance that in the midst of deleting the
SPAM, important messages may also be accidentally deleted. On more than one occasion
I personally have accidentally deleted important messages from clients while cleaning
out SPAM. This has sometimes resulted in a loss of income.
Further more, if your employees jobs involve sending E-mail messages to clients
or doing Internet based research, their Internet access could be greatly slowed
because the steady flow of inbound SPAM is consuming a large portion of the company’s
Internet bandwidth. As if that weren’t enough, SPAM sometimes contains malicious
scripts, viruses, etc.
 I recently helped
a friend who owns a trucking company deal with a SPAM problem in their organization.
The organization was receiving so much SPAM that it was becoming difficult to
even use E-mail. Each user was receiving dozens of messages every hour. The real
problems started though when the company received an outrageously expensive phone
bill. One of the users had apparently opened a message containing a malicious
script that caused the PC’s modem to dial a 900 number. In the end, I was able
to get rid of the dialer, but the SPAM problem had grown so far out of control
that everyone in the company had to get a new E-mail address. Of course that meant
informing all of the clients of the new contact information. To make a long story
short, this entire ordeal was a huge problem for this small company.
One of the more overlooked ways in which SPAM effects an organization’s productivity
is in the amount of time that users spend deleting it. A recent IDC white paper
estimates that one in every five E-mail messages that a person receives is SPAM
and that the average employee spends about 5 seconds getting rid of each SPAM
message.
Personally, I think that the ratio of SPAM to legitimate messages is much higher
than one in 5. Typically, in an average day I get about 30 legitimate E-mails
and well over 200 SPAM messages. Let’s assume that IDC is correct though and that
one out of every five messages that your employees receive are SPAM. Now, let’s
assume that the average employee gets 50 E-mail messages per day, ten of which
are SPAM. If IDC is correct in saying that it takes 5 seconds to look at and delete
a SPAM on average, then an employee that receives 10 SPAMs a day wastes 50 seconds
dealing with SPAM.
At first, 50 seconds of wasted time sounds trivial. However, if an organization
had 2000 employees, then the employees would be collectively wasting 10,000 seconds
or 27.7 man hours per day. This works out to 7,222.2 wasted man hours each year.
If the average employee earned $15 per hour then the company would be looking
at a financial loss of $108,333.33 per year in wasted man hours, just because
each employee spent a mere 50 seconds a day dealing with SPAM.
Click
Here to read the rest of the article.
About the Author:
Brien Posey has written thousands of technical articles on a variety
topics. You can access many of them by signing up for a free membership
to Brien's personal Web site at http://www.brienposey.com. Brien's Web site
also contains a forum area where you can post your most difficult
technical questions and a live chat area where you can talk directly to
the experts!
|
|
|
|
