“The average spam messages per day is 18.5 and the average time spent per day deleting them is 2.8 minutes. The loss in productivity is equivalent to $21.6 billion per year at average U.S. wages.”
- Jesdanun, A. (2005), “Deleting spam costs billions, study finds”, The Associated Press Newswires (online)
You can filter spam and viruses before they hit your mailserver
Let’s say there are ten people working in your office and monthly cost per person is 4500€ (25,50€ per hour). By eliminating spam you could save 9:48 hours or 249,90€ per month totaling 2998,80€ per year the study says. Ok, I know I’m quantifying the unquantifiable, but the amount is anyway far greater than zero.
In my opinion the problem that is not solved yet is the deployment. I think every tech savvy person filters their spam already. But how about the rest of the people. Sure, you can use time and install a spam filter to each client, you can also install a spam filter to mail server and get more results.
If you wish to install spam filter to every client computer it will take lot of time and possibly people can mess up their installations. Updating lots of PCs does not sound like a good idea either.
Installing spam filter to a mail server sounds like a better idea but it might be that you cannot go to the mail server. Another problem would be that having a universal spam filter that works with any mail server is not reality.
But what about I you could just use hardware based solution that works out-of-the-box with any kind of setup. Wouldn’t that be cool? Perhaps the easiest way to eliminate spam in any POP3, IMAP & SMTP scenario would be to set up a network attached spam filter. This way would be 100% transparent to clients and completely platform independent. In SMTP scenario (You are not using mail server of your service provider, instead you have your own mail server) you can directly block spam before it goes to your mail server. You can also set up a simple shell script to automatically log in to your mail accounts and sweep the spam with Spamassassin. This would also be useful if you use a mobile device e.g. an iPhone to read your mail.
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