The Hidden Cost of Internet Spam

In today’s fast paced environment, technologies such as mobile phones and internet have become very important tools of communication. These tools save a lot of time, money and energy, or do they?

 

In a corporate environment, the company mail has become a very important tool of communication. According to The Guardian, December 17, 2012 article by Nick Atkin¹, an independent research by Atos Origin highlighted that the average employee spends 40% of their working week dealing with internal emails which add no value to the business. This is likened to spam emails that take much of your time either reading or deleting. He also included that their own analysis found worrying levels of email traffic: of 95,000 emails sent, 75,000 were internal, while 68% of the 127,000 received also came from internal sources.

 

This is on the internal level; hence we cannot really consider them as spam emails. How about outside sources? If the remaining 32% of the received mails are from outside sources, how much of it are spam? Despite spam filters, around 19%² are spam emails, which translate to about 7,722.

 

If this bulk of corporate emails were a pie, it would look like the picture below:

 

 

 

These are only figures, but if you look closely, and try to dissect every aspect of it, you will realize that they cost a lot of money, and the dangerous part of it is that they are hiding behind the veils of corporate necessity.

 

 

Financial Impact

 

The federal minimum wage in the United States for covered non-exempt employees is $7.25³ per hour effective July 24, 2009, however, many states have also their own laws on minimum wage. In the event that an employee is subject to both the state and the federal minimum wage law, the employee is entitled to receive the higher of the two minimum wages.

 

For the purpose of quantifying how much manpower cost expenditure is wasted, we will use the federal minimum wage rate. Table 1 below summarizes the basic assumptions needed in computing for this expenditure.

 

Table 1: Basic Assumptions
Description	Unit	Amount
Minimum Wage Rate	Per Hour	$7.253
Average Time Spent Dealing with Internal Emails	Weekly	40%
Standard Working Hours	Hrs. / Day	8
Standard Working Days	Days / Week	5

 

 

To further illustrate, if we use the 40% mentioned by Atos Origin, then an employee spends sixteen (16) hours a week managing internal emails, for a total cost of US$464.00 per month. If we use this in a ratio and proportion to get the number of hours spent on external emails, we will arrive at eight (8) hours a week, and nineteen percent (19%) of that is spent on spam or two (2) hours to be exact.

 

If the employee is a minimum wage earner, then US$14.50 per week is being paid to him or her to do nothing but manage spam emails. This may be minimal, but if we escalate it to a higher level with more number of employees, the cost is alarming. Table 2 shows an example of the different scenarios depending on the number of employees.

 

 

Table 2: Labor Cost Paid Wasted to Spam Emails
Scenarios	No. of Employees	Cost / Month (US$)	Cost / Year (US$)
Company A	20	1,160.00	13,920.00
Company B	100	5,800.00	69,600.00
Company C	250	14,500.00	174,000.00
Company D	10,000	580,000.00	6,960,000.00

 

 

It must be noted that the figures above are based on a minimum wage earner’s hourly rate, which is very conservative. Consider the highly paid executives in the statistics, who are paid as high as US$97.00⁴ per hour or even more; do the math and the costs will multiply. Aside from that, not included are the overtime charges that may have been paid to employees who had to extend work because the time which should have been devoted to work was spent scanning and deleting these spam emails.

 

 These costs cannot be seen by the naked eye, and if you conduct a survey among the employees on the actual time spent managing emails, whether spam or legitimate, you will not get an honest answer. Try to search the internet for example for the published percentages on how much is spent by employees managing emails. You will come up with different results which according to authors are “based on surveys”.

 

It is for this reason that some offices totally ban the use of internet, except for company emails like Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook, wherein spam emails have a lesser chance of penetration.

 

Damages on a Personal Level

 

If the simple computation above shows the magnitude of wasted money in a corporate or workplace set-up, consider it doubled or even tripled on an individual personal level. This is due to the fact that the person is no longer tied to the working hours in the work place; hence more time is devoted to browse individual emails. In addition, the person is paying his or her internet service provider, and worse, if the person has not invested on security, then his or her data and computer maybe at risk against viruses associated with these spam.

 

Take for example the free web based email services like Google or Yahoo. Sometimes, when you are looking for an important email, you have to carefully sort through a lot of spam emails afraid that you might accidentally delete it. In some cases, scam emails sent through friends’ or relatives’ hacked email addresses are threatening, asking for money in the guise of some accident or mishap, or an advertisement for some pornographic sites.

 

There also lost things that we cannot put a tag price. The time you spent cleaning up your inbox could have been used to play with your kid, to do the laundry, to meet up that old college friend you had been planning to see, to repair the leaking faucet, to treat your wife to dinner, or to simply catch some sleep, and a hundred other things.

 

Afterthoughts

 

Email communication is an integral part in corporate survival and even in personal lives in today’s information age. It is for these reasons that scam, spam and the like were also invented, to take advantage of this necessity to serve different purposes. It becomes now the responsibility of the email user, be it on a corporate or individual level, to mitigate this risk if not totally eliminate it. For some, they invest on security measures no matter how costly, because it is worth it in the long run. And for those who don’t, it becomes a battle of who would eventually prevail.

 

 

Sources and References

 

1)    ¹ATKIN, N. (2012) 40% of staff time is wasted on reading internal emails. The Guardian, 12^th Dec. retrieved from:  http://www.guardian.co.uk

 

2)    ²WASSERMAN, T. (2012) Email Takes Up 28% of Workers' Time [REPORT]. Available from:  http://mashable.com/2012/08/01/email-workers-time/ (Accessed 5/30/2013)

 

3)    ³United States Department of Labor (n.d) Minimum Wage (www.dol.gov) Available from: http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/wages/minimumwage.htm (Accessed 6/07/2013)

 

4)    MONEY.USNEWS.COM (n.d.) Careers- Best Jobs 2013 (WWW) money.usnews.com. Available from: http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs Accessed (6/09/2013)