Interesting ROI calcuator for SPAM Filters
Sent on 6/15/2003
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The new Spam filters seem to be catching most of the garbage email that has been flooding the server (and the Internet) of late.
Win2K News has an interesting calculator on their website. The purpose is of course to sell you their software, but since we are already blocking the spam you do not need to purchase what they are selling, however the annual dollars that spam mail cost in lost productivity is quite interesting. I used their calculator to figure the cost across the users on our system divided by the almost 900 pieces of email that get stripped out per day (graphed here: http://www.microworks.net/news.html) and found that the annual cost would be almost $8,000.00!
Wow! Maybe we should start charging you more because we are now filtering this stuff out. Not! We’re just glad to be reducing the clog in our own mailbox too.
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How Much Does Sp@m Cost Your Organization?
All kinds of reports are swirling about the Net, done by analysts that push out reports with billions of dollars in expected damages caused by junk email. Usually those reports sound wildly overstated, and I have included one in the “third party section below”.
So, we got interested to find out for ourselves, for a relatively small outfit like ours, with 80 staff and average 10-20 sp@ms per employee per day what the REAL cost was in lost time. Of course you cannot put a number on the irritation factor, so we left that out. And how many seconds does it take to delete sp@m? Pretty fast but when you receive it at the office you’ll spend perhaps 3 seconds to make sure it’s not a false positive. This “what-if” was kinda fun, so we decided to write some code and automate it. To keep things simple, we left out the cost caused by the admin time lost, Exchange servers being used, storage consumption, and network bandwidth losses. This ROI calculator just takes lost time into account.
And we added a line at the end, with how long it would take for our favorite junk email filter to pay back for itself. [grin] Sometimes these kinds of vendor provided ROI calculators are skewed, and you cannot really trust them. This one is completely correct though. You can test that by entering the value “1” in each field and see that the calculation is on the up-and-up. So here you go, try it out for your own organization!