The Problem

According to MSNBC's article “Now 2/3 of all email is Spam,” the production of spam is up 5% from when the CAN-SPAM Act was passed. Brian Czarny, vice president of marketing at Message Labs made the prediction that "In terms of what we could see in a year, we could see percentages in the upper 90s." The article attributed to the increase in spam to the tactics that spammers use (Sullivan, 2004).

So, the majority of the email in the world is now undesirable and spammers are accosting the greater part of us to get at the very few that read and interact with their material. But how much does it cost?

A study done in June 2004 by Nucleus Research, indicates that if an individual working at a company were to get 30 legitimate emails a day, there are approximately 70 emails that the user receives that is spam. Now most people don't see the full 70 emails, but will see some, dependent on the filtering device that the company uses. However, the spam on the server is taking up quite a bit of space. In the same study, if an average size of an email is 3 KB per message, the user would receive almost 5 MB of undesired mail each month. The study concluded that with an organization of 100 employees, the amount of junk email a month is around 500 MB. This adds up to a sizeable amount of bandwidth being used for mail that isn't wanted. Include lost wages for the employees that have to go through and delete the spam, the money that a company or an individual has to pay to keep up with anti-spamming software and technology, and it becomes apparent why spam is such a problem (Hall, 2004).

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