|
"Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam; ..." — Monty Python's Flying Circus, 1970 (read the full skit) |
Beginning from the time when the word "spam" was used as a pejorative item in this now-famous Monty Python sketch to what you now have with the unsolicited junk messages clogging your electronic mail, spam has gone from being humorous to being the harbinger of serious consequences.
According to testimony given to the Federal Trade Commission by America Online even as early as 1997, on any given day approximately a third of all messages received from the Internet is spam. In fact, it was spam that overwhelmed AT&T WorldNet's system in July 1997 and caused hours of delay for legitimate messages. For corporate email users, a study published in the Communications of the ACM in August 1998 estimates that spam received by AT&T Research and Bell Labs Research ranged from 5% to 15%. Today in 2003 estimates range upwards of 45% of corporate received email traffic.
Suffice it to say that spam is a growing problem that continues unabated that led your company to purchase this email content filtering product.
The consequences of the deluge of spam fall into several distinct areas for any company using email and which is the victim of spam.
Loss of human resources on the part of the recipient who has to open the junk messages and to delete them.
Loss of computer resources as the junk messages take up valuable storage space.
Loss of human resources on the part of the email administrator who has to deal with Internet mail delivery being bogged down.
Loss of connectivity bandwidth that is being stolen to needlessly carry the spam.
Loss of company reputation if its mail hosts are being hijacked to relay spam and the public is led to believe the company is engaged in spamming activity.
In total, for the spam recipients, the price is too high. Take, for example, the productivity loss from the simple act of deleting the spam from one's inbox. Assuming it takes five seconds to complete the deletion, at an fully-loaded average of $25 per hour per employee (salary, benefits, desk space, etc.) the productivity loss is costing the company $0.03 for each spam. While that may seem small, multiply it by the thousands of spam that may be received and you will see how big the problem really is. And that is just in terms of the productivity loss by the recipients, item 1 in the above list!
Of course there are many other ills borne by Internet email! Here are some of the worse examples.
Email carrying virus infections and self-propagating worms
Reverse NDR attacks to turn your mail server into an indirect email relay
The problems are so serious that email is in jeopardy as a business tool. With experience in Internet email products since 1992, CMS had the foresight to release Praetor in 1999 to stem the tide that has become such a big problem with email today.
How ironic, then, that the root cause of spam is its low cost from the viewpoint of the perpetrators. Using a single unlimited account with any ISP with a monthly charge of $20 or less, a spammer can send out millions of messages using a slow 28.8Kbps modem. An estimate of a penny for 10,000 messages is probably "in the ballpark" with respect to the cost to send out spam.