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Are You Getting a Return on Investment With Your Spam Filter?

February 3, 2009

Spam is a rapidly growing problem. Without an effective spam filter to stop spam from invading your employees’ inboxes, you can be wasting hundreds of thousands - or even millions - of dollars in lost productivity and sales. Although free spam protection may stop some of the messages that are sent to your employees, they are generally very basic and do not have the technology needed to stop all spam. They are also likely to delete perfectly legitimate emails from your customers, vendors, or business partners because of outdated technology and inefficient algorithms.

Nucleus Research determined that the average employee loses 3.1% of productivity due to time spent deleting unwanted emails or searching for emails that were deleted in error. This equates to about $2.1 million for a company with 1,000 employees. In comparison to this, a few hundred dollars for effective email security to stop spam is a small investment with a big return.

In order to have the highest possible detection rate with the lowest possible false positive rate, spam filters needs to quickly analyze a variety of factors for each incoming message. Free spam protection may only look at a small set of factors, filtering out messages that contain one or two suspicious words that may actually be legitimate. Emails from customers can be lost, sometimes irretrievably. More advanced solutions will examine the whole message and look for combinations of words to determine whether the email might be spam. This is known as context sensitivity.

In addition to using context sensitivity to stop spam, a sophisticated spam blocker should look at other factors as well. For example, spam can often be recognized by examining certain attributes of the sender and recipients. Sender addresses that have been modified, a large number of recipients, and the size and format of the email are all factors that a spam filter will analyze before deleting the message or delivering it to the user’s inbox. When spam filters analyze many different factors, the accuracy of the filter is greatly improved.

As spam senders learn new ways to get their messages past the spam filters on the market, your spam filter must evolve if it will be effective in its job to stop spam. Without a continuing investment in technology, you will spend far more on paying employees to delete spam or look for lost messages than you would ever spend on a highly advanced spam filter.

Managed email security offers the best technology to stop spam while requiring zero administration for employees and IT departments.

Protecting your business from spam does not need to be expensive, corporations can get enterprise class managed email security yielding as much as 4,000% return on investment.

by Christopher Spence

Written by paydayla · Filed Under Investment 

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