How do you determine the cost of spam?

It’s getting harder and harder to escape spam, whether it’s from our private or professional email addresses. Spamming generates costs for the recipient, but not for the sender.

On the sender’s side, the cost of a spam message is close to zero euros.
In fact, the only costs involved in sending spam are the maintenance of the mailing list and the writing of spam content. To send spam, the sender uses free routing software.

If spam has a commercial purpose, the purchase of the proposed product often pays for itself after 5 to 10 orders. In this case, spam can earn the sender a lot of money.
Not so for the recipient.
For a private individual, there’s no such thing as the cost of receiving spam. It’s more a question of wasted time. The cost of spamming for an individual is linked to the purchase of anti-spam software.

For professionals, it’s more worrying. Many studies show the hidden costs of spam for professionals, whether in payroll costs to protect against spam, lost productivity or infrastructure costs.

In order to keep their communication systems free from spam, companies are obliged to budget for staff to manage spamming. Studies show that there is one employee for every 700 employees. He will be responsible for maintaining the anti-spamming infrastructure and assisting employees who have had problems with anti-spam, such as lost mail.

In terms of lost productivity, studies have shown how much time each employee spends detecting, consulting and/or deleting spam that has slipped through anti-spam filters.
They estimate that an employee spends around 7 seconds per spam message. If we multiply this figure by the number of employees, we can see that the cost to the company is far from negligible.

But the economic loss of spam is even greater. Unfortunately, in the case of spamming, a malfunction in the email processing system due to an influx of spam can lead to the loss of production data, contracts, tenders, etc…
Essential messages can be lost, with all the consequences that can be imagined for the economic life of the company.

For all these reasons, companies are obliged to invest in software and hardware to combat spam, at a significant cost to their infrastructure. Not to mention that this cost is increased by the anti-virus software that monitors infected messages. Add to this the cost of servers, data storage, etc… While spamming can make money for the sender, it’s certainly costly for the recipient.

At our level, in order to have a more accurate estimate of the cost of spam in a company, taking into account direct and indirect costs, an evaluation equivalent to 2.5 man-days gives a value close to reality.