Corporations facing spam headache
By Nick Easen for CNN
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Those of us who buy items advertised in junk or spam e-mails are encouraging its proliferation.
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LONDON, England (CNN) -- Lower mortgage rates, improve your sex life, cell phones at no cost, free DVD player, zero balance, larger breasts or cheap cigarettes ...
Seen these phrases somewhere before? These are just some of the common words used for junk, or spam, e-mail.
Any mention of these gives many businesses and their respective IT departments a headache -- they see spam as the modern-day corporate scourge.
As spam continues to clog up servers, reduce bandwidth and suck up man-hours, corporations are realizing a more proactive approach is needed to tackle this growing problem.
And recent anti-spam laws passed in the U.S. and UK have done little to alleviate concern. Those in the industry say the rulings are not enough. (Full story)
"I am afraid as a general rule, regulation is the last thing you should resort to," John Higgins of Intellect, the IT industry body in the UK, told CNN.
"The most likely solution is going to be technological spam filters that go back to where it originates and try to cut it out at that point."
The main problem is the amount of time employees are wasting on spam. One company, Marshall Aerospace, gets about 60,000 to 70,000 items of spam every month.
"If our employees had to open them all -- even if they spent 10 seconds on each e-mail -- it would cost us £60,000 ($111,000) a month," says Alan Paul, IT manager at Marshall Aerospace.
"Over Christmas, spam went up to 80 percent although it has probably stabilized now at about 40 to 50 percent of incoming mail."
There is no doubt the volume of spam has been on a dramatic rise, says one e-mail security company MessageLabs, which filters more than 30 million e-mails a day.
The company now intercepts 27 spam messages every second -- last year it was only three.
There is also a sinister convergence between security threats and spam.
Viruses and unwanted spyware capable of revealing company secrets, passwords and data now accompany these e-mails and install themselves on corporate machines.
"The techniques spammers use are becoming very sophisticated in terms of volume and in terms of shielding where they are really coming from," explains Mark Sunner from MessageLabs.
Another crucial process involves ensuring important and legitimate e-mails are not blocked and legitimate marketers are able to find their customers.
So why do spammers spam?
"The bottom line is that there is money in this and spammers operate on a return of about a tenth of one percent," says Sunner.
"If you apply this to a billion messages then it is potentially lucrative. And it is working --- people are clicking on these things and actually ordering products."
-- CNN's Robyn Curnow contributed to this report
