Personally quantifying the spam mess

I let my spam folder fill up over five days and — stopwatch in tow — I just forced myself to face the mess and clean it up, checking for miscategorized mail and so on.

Here are the stats:
– 1203 e-mails I had to sift through (241 e-mails a day) from which I had to save 9 non-spam e-mails which’d been incorrectly tagged.
– 21.5 minutes of my time
– That’s 26 hours of my time wasted yearly
– At an approximate $75/hr worth of my time, that’s $1,613 dollars.
– For a company of 1,000 employees, that’s 1.6 million dollars just in lost time (doesn’t count bandwidth or storage costs).

But our government finds it more important to chase after naked breasts instead of really applying firepower to the war against spam. Wonderful.


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3 responses to “Personally quantifying the spam mess”

  1. TDavid Avatar

    I’ve been demoing Norton’s Antispam proggy and it has been reliably kicking spams butt. I’m way down from what I was receiving before (over 1000 spam mails per day) with a good false positive ratio.

  2. Jason Avatar

    Yeah, I can’t wait until the govenment makes laws against everything.

  3. Adam Avatar

    TDavid… but that’s the problem.  POPfile is already doing such a fabulous job (less than 1% error rate), that it’s too easy for me to miss the few errors amongst the barrage of spam; it’s like looking for needles in a haystack.

    Even ONE false positive a month is too much, considering that I almost missed an interview invitation for a very reputable company in one almost-junked e-mail!

    Oh, and Jason, how WOULD you propose that spam be dealt with?  Purely with technology?  Are you against junk fax laws, too?

What do you think?