Spam is a £5 billion-a-year (US$8.3 billion) threat to British and Irish businesses -- at least, so claims a company that's selling corporate email software that it says can help contain the problem.
Novell, which has a groupware product called GroupWise, commissioned the study by Benchmark Research. The firm interviewed 801 information technology employees in the UK and found that most got at least five junk emails a day, and that about 1 in 7 received more than 25. Three-quarters spent up to 15 minutes a day "reading, deleting, filing, or responding to spam, and an amazing 15 percent wasted an hour doing the same." Product promotions topped the list of spam species, followed by MAKE MILLIONS!!! schemes. But also cited: chain letters, porn, religious come-ons, property deals, and personal harassments, among others. Moral of the survey: Spam is making your online worker inefficient.
As for that £5 billion figure, here's where it came from: The study said that at any particular time, some 1.4 percent of the United Kingdom's workforce is dealing with spam. Multiply that by a "wage bill" of about £378 billion ($US600 billion), and you've got yourself a headline-grabbing number.
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__"100 percent Internet economy": __Wired cofounder John Battelle finally did come up with a name for the weekly magazine he's doing for tech-publishing behemoth IDG, and it's not Wired for Dummies as the Sucksters had suggested would be apt. It's The Industry Standard, and it debuted today, claiming big-name writers and editors, blockbuster advertisers, and "an elite audience of more than 60,000 key Internet industry influencers." The online version will be updated daily, IDG says, with an old Wired whipping boy among its features: "Media Grok," an exposition of how "mainstream media" covers the Net economy.
Reuters contributed to this report.
