A few decades ago junk mail used to be the bane of offices. With personnel having to sort through unwanted letters and flyers to get to the legitimate mail. But since the advent of email, the problem has taken on a digital form and has become exponentially worse.

Email is still the preferred method of communication both for work and personal life. A testament to this is the more than 281 billion emails we send every day. And this is projected to only continue to grow to approximately 333 billion per day by 2022.

Nearly 50 percent of all email is spam.

In our work helping companies to increase their productivity through technology, our Neuron Computers team runs into the question often, “How can we stop all the spam?!”, in order to offer better IT consulting services for small business. This a common problem that’s shared by businesses, no matter where they are or what industry they’re in.

In some cases, spam even causes an organization to go through the cost of changing the domain they’re using for their email to help stop the flood of unwanted spam.

Why is spam so prevalent?

Spam emails are cheap to send and can immediately get in front of someone where they live and work, their email inbox. Government’s have tried to keep up by creating laws such as the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which penalizes companies that engage in unsolicited spam emails. But with the world only a click away, there’s not much that can be done when the email is coming from a far-off country.

How Costly is Spam?

It’s estimated that 49.7 percent of all email is spam. That means that about half the time employees spend going through their email inboxes to read and address messages is wasted having to short through and identify spam from legitimate emails.

What does that cost look like?

According to the Washington Post, employees spend about 4.1 hours per day checking work email, either on a desktop computer or mobile phone. Even if we take off ½ that time assuming it’s spent writing email replies, that leaves 2.05 hours just sorting through email.

Take 49.7% of that for the estimated amount of spam, and that leaves 1.02 hours per day just dealing with spam, for each employee.

If you had 10 employees, each earning an average of $20 per hour, that would add up to $204.00 per day in productivity costs lost to spam, or a spam cost of over $4,400 every month (averaging 21.7 working days).

There aren’t many businesses that can afford to be losing over $4,000 per month due to unwanted messages.

Other Problems with Spam

Besides just the productivity costs from time spent having to identify and delete spam in your inbox, there are other problems that end up costing your business one way or another. For example:

• Overload of communications means important messages may get deleted
• Irritation at having to delete spam brings down morale
• Bandwidth can be taken up by the server having to handle all that spam
• Computers and devices can be slowed by the influx of spam messages
• Storage space isn’t free, and spam can cause you to pay to upgrade before you should have to
• Spam can contain dangerous viruses or malicious links, that can modify Features of Microsoft Edge or other browsers.

Anti-Spam Solutions from Neuron Computers

While there are some server-based programs out there that attempt to stem the flow of spam, a problem many organizations experience is having legitimate email blocked by too wide a filter. So, they struggle with choosing to deal with spam or possibly not getting important emails, which could cause them to miss sales opportunities.

Neuron Computers spends hours just researching and field testing a variety of software so we can bring the best of the best tools to our clients. We call this our Recommended Technology Platform and around this, we base important customer support services.

One of our most popular services is one that does an excellent job of identifying spam and stopping it before it gets to your inbox. With smart filtering, this technology can sort the good messages from the spam, to ensure you’re not missing out on important legitimate communications.

To further enhance our anti-spam service, we have companion plugins that allow you to train the system to be even smarter at filtering out spam and identifying the good emails.

The benefits include gaining that productivity time back because your staff no longer has to spend an hour or more a day sorting through spam. You’ll able to get just the emails you need without having to store spam, and you can actually get stuff done without being dragged down by tons of junk emails.

Contact Us Today to Learn More about Our Anti-Spam Solutions

Is your team spending valuable time dealing with spam on a daily basis? Neuron Computers can help! Contact us today for a free demo of our anti-spam solutions and training plugins, and take your inboxes back!