* The spammers have already won
We’ve all heard about the cost of spam – the several seconds that individual users spend reading each spam message multiplied by the number of junk messages they receive each day multiplied by their hourly salary. We’ve heard about the cost of storage and servers and anti-spam software and gateways and the like. It’s all very expensive and designed simply to prevent the garbage from reaching us that spammers should have the integrity not to send us in the first place.
However, the most expensive part of spam – and the one that is hardest to quantify – is what I call the “threshold” costs of spam that don’t occur on a regular basis, but that can represent a huge cost to an organization.
Osterman Research is a small company, and we outsource most of our messaging functionality since we don’t want to maintain our facilities in-house. As a result, we have somewhat less control over our messaging functionality than we would like. Recently, our outsourced provider determined that we were spamming (which we definitely were not), most likely because we sent out a request to several hundred members of our panel at one time to complete a survey.
The response of our provider was simply to deny us access to our SMTP server without any warning. Because the subsequent bounceback messages were hidden in our spam quarantine, we didn’t immediately realize what had happened. We were able to change service providers quickly and easily to make sure the problem doesn’t happen again (one of the real benefits of outsourcing).
So what was the cost of this incident? A client at Microsoft was unable to receive e-mail I was sending him in response to an inquiry. A public relations firm representing a company that wanted to brief us on its technology could not receive my e-mail. A reporter did not receive a file with data from a recent survey for a story he is writing. A woman with whom I’m working to set up a conference engagement in London this October did not receive my e-mail.
I can’t really quantify the cost of any of these problems, but they are definitely expensive and damaging. That kind of damage is perhaps the greatest cost of spam.
