BLADAM - Entry - Personally quantifying the spam mess

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Personally quantifying the spam mess

I let my spam folder fill up over five days and -- stopwatch in tow -- I just forced myself to face the mess and clean it up, checking for miscategorized mail and so on.

Here are the stats:
- 1203 e-mails I had to sift through (241 e-mails a day) from which I had to save 9 non-spam e-mails which'd been incorrectly tagged.
- 21.5 minutes of my time
- That's 26 hours of my time wasted yearly
- At an approximate $75/hr worth of my time, that's $1,613 dollars.
- For a company of 1,000 employees, that's 1.6 million dollars just in lost time (doesn't count bandwidth or storage costs).

But our government finds it more important to chase after naked breasts instead of really applying firepower to the war against spam. Wonderful.

- Blathered by Adam on Wednesday, February 4, 2004 at 18:56 [ Permalink | Trackback ]
- Filed under Geekery
- Commented on by 4 folks so far. Scroll down and see for yourself (and join in the conversation!)

Comment from
TDavid

[ BLADAM Profile | URL ]

I’ve been demoing Norton’s Antispam proggy and it has been reliably kicking spams butt. I’m way down from what I was receiving before (over 1000 spam mails per day) with a good false positive ratio.

- Posted on Thursday, February 5, 2004 at 9:55 [ Permalink to this comment ]

Comment from
Jason

[ BLADAM Profile | URL ]

Yeah, I can’t wait until the govenment makes laws against everything.

- Posted on Thursday, February 5, 2004 at 15:20 [ Permalink to this comment ]

Comment from member
Adam
San Francisco

Adam's avatar

[ BLADAM Profile | URL ]

TDavid… but that’s the problem. POPfile is already doing such a fabulous job (less than 1% error rate), that it’s too easy for me to miss the few errors amongst the barrage of spam; it’s like looking for needles in a haystack.

Even ONE false positive a month is too much, considering that I almost missed an interview invitation for a very reputable company in one almost-junked e-mail!

Oh, and Jason, how WOULD you propose that spam be dealt with? Purely with technology? Are you against junk fax laws, too?

- Posted on Thursday, February 5, 2004 at 19:29 [ Permalink to this comment ]

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