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Spam, So what exactly does it cost?

Every day we receive tones of Mails that we should have opted not to receive, and we simply delete them or put in the junk folder of your mail recipient software’s (MUA).  Most users have never thought of the actual cost being incurred or directly associated with Junk data. While Most organizations especially  in developing world today simply brash off the idea of having spam solutions, we have seen an increasing demand of Spam and virus filter grow from under 5% in 2005 to about 20% in early 2007.
In Europe alone it is estimated that there are slightly over Five thousand companies specializing in spam Management and the business is booming, contrary to African countries where we barely have a company who do the same save for Messagelabs Africa.
In this Month Issue Messagelabs Africa will outline facts about spam and try to help organization calculate their respective spam cost. This will help Organizations realize the need to move to managed email systems and start saving revenue. Messagelabs Africa is dedicated to ensure that spam is eradicated off African Bandwidth and help organizations have a company they can depend on to solve any mail related problems while protecting their data and ensure reliability. Many people have started embracing the need for specialization and here at Messagelabs Africa we have taken our portion in the larger Information technology sector. We will ensure mails are delivered to your network clean and timely.

Facts:

• Few companies know how their email system work and what exact cost is involve in delivering the mails from one network to their network. 
• Most Organizations knows very little about their users experience with spam or junk contents.
• Most Companies do not know what exactly spam cost. 
• You can not know the latter until you know the former, in order to analyze and come up with the exact cost of spam to your network you need to start by doing the following.
• The first step to look at your network architecture, including equipment, services, and how they integrate with business processes within your network. 
• Secondly you need to know what your incoming data are? How do protocols share your bandwidth and what fraction is actually taken by incoming mails.
• Then you need to know what costs are associated with Management and maintenance of your emails also important is the cost associated with storage of mails including desktops and backups.
• The next thing you need to do is talk to your end users, I know this is hard but yes we got to do it and  get to know exactly what they usually do with the spam, you will also need to find out from them how much email they receive and send each month. You will need to consider that as internal and external routing and then ask the users what percentage of mails received they perceive to be spam. You also should watch users handle mails and figure out on average basis what time users take to handle mails.

• What percentage of your available bandwidth is actually used? I.e. if your total bandwidth is 100% what percentage is being taken by the entire traffic.
• What fraction of the used bandwidth is used by email data commonly referred to us SMTP or pop? Of the used bandwidth what percentage is being taken by emails
• These can always be found using traffic analyzers if your ISP can not tell you, though they should be able to tell you this. 
• What’s storage costs you incur on emails per month 
• How many emails do your users send and receive per day. 
• How much Spam does your users get each day per user basis 
• How long does it take a single user to deal with Spam
• And last you will need to know the total cost of an employee including salaries plus benefits per month, divide this per month and also calculate what is the total employee burdened per hour.

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