Tallying the true cost of spam

Frank Gillman was frustrated that spam had essentially rendered useless the BlackBerries he deployed to 220 lawyers at the Allen Matkins legal firm in Los Angeles.

But Gillman, the firm's director of technology, said there was one consolation he took from the experience: It helped open his eyes to the enormous cost of spam - roughly a half-million dollars per year in lost productivity, network storage, wasted bandwidth and end-user support for his company.

The good news is that he's since reduced that burden by about 80%.

Surveys by research firms that peg the cost of spam at hundreds of dollars per typical U.S. worker, or billions of dollars to the overall economy, fail to adequately convey what Gillman and other network executives are learning from running the numbers on their own organizations. In an effort to personalize that more abstract research data, Gillman agreed to share his firm's numbers with Network World.

Among the key findings:

• Between the lawyers at Allen Matkins and their support staff of 300, lost productivity shoveling spam was estimated at $300,000.

• Bandwidth consumption accounted for another $17,000.

• Storage costs were pegged at $114,000 more.

When the firm gave the lawyers the BlackBerries in 2000, the reaction was universally positive and appreciative. But it wasn't long before that giddiness gave way to the realities of spam, which even then represented about 54% of the firm's messaging traffic, Gillman says.

Many lawyers ditched the devices because the onslaught of spam was so heavy. At the time the devices replicated a user's in-box instead of providing real-time alerts as they do today.

"We got the same spam twice, once at work and once on the BlackBerry. It was very frustrating," says Gillman, who spearheads IT for the firm's six offices throughout California.

That was the human toll. The financial burden was even more depressing - spam had cost more than $1,000 per user per year, he says.

Gillman reduced spam's cost per user down to roughly $200 per year, in large part by contracting with a spam-filtering service that keeps most junk e-mails from reaching his network or Microsoft Exchange e-mail servers.

"The BlackBerry issue is what made us go get a spam filter," says Gillman, who outsourced the job to FrontBridge Technologies in early 2001 at a cost of $3,500 per month. "The BlackBerry was an incredible resource and time-management tool, but we found out the true cost of spam is the amount of time you have to waste dealing with it."

Gillman says user productivity losses, which took into account the number of spams users dealt with factored with an average hourly wage, was more than $300,000 per year before the filter was deployed.

"The loss of productivity wasn't just in dealing with the spam messages," Gillman says. He estimates that his end users were spending about 5 seconds handling each spam.

"Our users are really sensitive to viruses and there were concerns that some of these messages could contain viruses, which meant time spent making and fielding user support questions." Those fears persisted even though the firm runs anti-virus software.