* Spam and productivity
Arguably the most annoying factor for all of us is that constant stream of offers for products boasting that it will “enhance” our lives in one way or another. And even more amazing is the fact that *somebody* must respond to these spam ads; otherwise the spammers wouldn’t bother to send them!
That aside, spam continues to be one of the biggest Internet bandwidth hogs, and most products designed to deal with spam are marginally effective at best. And even the best products still must be implemented on your servers and you have to download all of the traffic before you can filter it. (Yet another case for the oft-resisted move to network-based services?)
Our colleague Peter Brockmann of Brockmann & Company recently published the results of some research on exactly how much spam is affecting our lives, and the results are quite impressive. The first finding is that there is a tremendous gap between the extent to which e-mail is important to the respondents’ business, with 83% reporting that it was “very important,” while only 21% of the respondents are satisfied with their e-mail experience.
In case anybody was wondering, e-mail is now by far the singular most important communications tool. In fact, according to Peter’s research, e-mail is a key tool for 86% of his survey respondents, while mobile telephony ran a poor second at 60%, and desktop telephony came in a very poor 45%.
In the near future, we’ll hear directly from Peter concerning his proposed methodology for quantifying spam and its impact on productivity. In the meantime, if you would like to get a preview, you can get a copy of the report at Webtorials.
