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Spam Filter for Outlook can be Spam will cost large companies
nearly $2,000 per employee in lost productivity this year, despite
improving technology designed to block the ever-growing volume of
unsolicited commercial messages aimed at workers' e-mail accounts,
according to a new report.
Workers at some of the country's biggest corporations report that they
spend nearly 15 minutes every day sifting through an average of 29
unsolicited e-mail messages, dramatically higher than the seven minutes
they spent sorting through spam in 2003. The findings are based on a
survey of workers at Fortune 500 companies conducted by Wellesley,
Mass.-based Nucleus Research Inc.
Based on the amount of time workers spend on weeding out spam, Nucleus
estimated that companies will lose $1,934 for every employee in 2004,
compared to $874 in 2003, said Shruti Yadav, the report's author.
Nucleus conducted telephone interviews with "representative employees"
from Fortune 500 firms in July 2003 and May 2004. Employees at 117
companies were interviewed in the 2003 study; Nucleus called the same
group of employees in 2004, reaching 82 people included in the original
sample.
"We found the effectiveness of spam filters and other anti-spam
technologies was being rendered ineffective by the growing volume of
mail," Yadav said.
"Spam" currently accounts for more than 70 percent of total e-mail
volume worldwide, according to anti-spam filtering company Postini Inc.
E-mail filtering software is catching more unwanted messages, but the
massive increase in the amount of spam on the Internet means that people
will continue to receive more of it, Yadav said. Companies that used
filters received about 20 percent less spam than companies that did not,
according to the study. That compares to 26 percent less in 2003.
Executives for several large companies in the Washington area said they
see more spam hitting their systems but are turning away most of it.
Bethesda, Md.-based hotel and hospitality services firm Marriott
International saw an immediate decrease in spam after installing
anti-spam software last June, said Dave Ruby, senior vice president of
information resources.
In June 2003, Marriott, which has 128,000 employees, blocked nearly half
of the 6.8 million e-mail messages it received after installing the
software. In May 2004, the company fielded 22.2 million inbound messages
and blocked 14.5 million. Ruby declined to say what kind of software the
company uses.
Washington, D.C.-based mortgage financing giant Fannie Mae, which has
5,000 employees, uses systems that check incoming e-mail for viruses,
suspicious text messages and questionable sender addresses, said Brian
Cobb, vice president of enterprise systems management. He said that spam
does not affect worker productivity.
Spam accounts for 80 percent of the e-mail arriving at Arlington,
Va.-based US Airways, but filtering keeps all but half a percent of it
from reaching its more than 28,000 employees' in-boxes, said spokeswoman
Amy Kudwa.
Nucleus's Yadav said that these examples do not jibe with the
experiences of most large companies.
"There may be specific examples where the IT administrators have set
their anti-spam filters to very stringent rules," she said. "But because
end users are becoming increasingly anxious about losing legitimate
mail, some companies are becoming less aggressive in how they are
setting their spam filters."
Yadav said companies underestimate the amount of productivity they lose
to spam. Survey respondents estimated that spam was costing their
companies an average of $220 per employee in lost productivity each
year, about a tenth of the $1,934 that Nucleus estimated the companies
were losing. Nucleus based the spam cost figures on an estimate of $30
per hour that companies spend on average to pay their employees'
salaries and benefits.
Eric Hahn, chairman of Cupertino, Calif.-based anti-spam firm Proofpoint
Inc., said he believes the spam problem is made worse because many
companies and individual computer users are not using top-tier anti-spam
filters.
"There's 300 vendors in the spam mitigation market, and 295 of them are
not the best ... products out there," said Hahn, the former chief
technology officer for Internet browser company Netscape Communications
Inc.
Hahn said that companies should support stiffer legislation and
aggressive law enforcement efforts to punish spammers. "More prosecution
more jail time, better tighter prosecution will help," he said.
The federal Can-Spam Act took effect on Jan. 1, making it a crime to
falsify the "from" and "subject" information in e-mail messages. Some
states, including Maryland and Virginia, have instituted similar laws
that carry longer jail sentences.
For the latest information about
spam
The Goals of spam
The goal of spam
is to determine the intrinsic grouping in a set of unlabeled data. But
how to decide what constitutes a good spam? It can be shown that
there is no absolute “best” criterion which would be independent of the
final aim of the spam. Consequently, it is the user which must
supply this criterion, in such a way that the result of the spam
will suit their needs.
For instance, we could be interested in finding representatives for
homogeneous groups (data reduction), in finding “natural
clusters” and describe their unknown properties (“natural” data
types), in finding useful and suitable groupings (“useful” data
classes) or in finding unusual data objects (outlier detection).
For the latest information about
The Goals of spam
Who uses spam?
Many different types of organizations use
spam as a vital
part of the work. A sampling of these include:
-
Marketing:
finding groups of customers with similar behavior given a large
database of customer data containing their properties and past
buying records;
-
Biology:
classification of plants and animals given their features;
-
Libraries:
book ordering;
-
Insurance:
identifying groups of motor insurance policy holders with a high
average claim cost; identifying frauds;
-
City-planning:
identifying groups of houses according to their house type,
value and geographical location;
-
Earthquake
studies: spam observed earthquake epicenters to
identify dangerous zones;
-
WWW:
document classification; spam weblog data to discover
groups of similar access patterns.
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Spam Filter for Outlook
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