The survey reveals that while companies see the spam problem as a nuisance, the bigger problem is determining what constitutes spam. This often leads to an "all or nothing" approach to its prevention that fails to recognize the varying interests and needs of recipients.

To combat this problem, the company announces the first patented proactive solution that is flexible, intelligent and not reliant upon exact match lists. This industrial-strength scalable solution has already proven to deliver over 90% effectiveness and is expected to reach over 95%.

The service, a new version of SkyScan AS, adopts MessageLabs' revolutionary heuristics technology, seeking out and stopping spam at the Internet level. The service identifies "spam DNA" and has advanced capabilities such as the ability to differentiate between spam and legitimate direct marketing pieces.

How do businesses view spam?

MessageLabs' research classifies two distinct groups of email users: power users (those who receive more than 50 emails per day) and casual users (those who receive less than 50 emails per day). 51% of both groups perceive more than 30% of their daily emails to be spam, and during the course of one hour, they waste a significant amount of time dealing with it. 45% of power users devote up to one third of this time to spam.

These numbers illustrate the impact of spam on business' bottom lines, with employee time, bandwidth and storage space all compromised. However, businesses do not yet feel overwhelmed by spam email, with 43% regarding it as a "minor" business problem. Nonetheless, 65% fear the problem will significantly increase in the coming year.

According to the survey, businesses classify spam primarily as a promotional, news/update or general email from someone they don't know - the distinguishing factor being an unknown sender.

However, businesses do not automatically consider spam to be bad. 58% agree that they don't want to get rid of spam altogether, but instead need a more selective filter that will allow passage only to messages of interest. Hence, the value of spam is really imputed by the user, who craves the ability to exercise choice and discretion when it comes to deleting it.

MessageLabs believes that the lack of clear definition highlighted by these responses is responsible both for the rise of spam and the relative lack of success that companies have had in stopping it. Indeed, nearly half of those questioned who had current spam filtering technology in place said that it was 'ineffective.'

"We know that spam affects millions of people and has a major impact on productivity and resources. But, the problem is that it not only gets through, but that firms don't know how to define it - with viruses it is easy, but one man's spam is potentially another's useful information. Traditional methods of stopping it using black and white lists are not sophisticated enough to make that distinction and have proved ineffective," says John Harrington, director of U.S. marketing, MessageLabs.

This view is supported by Steve Paskach, vice president of information technology at Minnesota Rubber, a 1000+ employee company. "To extract yourself from the spam quagmire is close to impossible. We get some users receiving 70-100 spam messages a day - which is a significant drag on our resources," says Paskach. "The problem is definitely going to get worse and the solutions out there need to be more intelligent so they can fight it. MessageLabs is on the right track."

In addition, respondents to the survey see a clear link between viruses, spam and porn. Many cited that in order to make anti-spam software easy, productive and flexible to use they would like to see all emails screened for viruses and porn. MessageLabs is the only managed service provider to offer proactive protection against all three.

The survey was conducted in July 2002 and results are based on the responses of 200 general business managers across the U.S.

 

Survey Highlights

79% of C-level execs are convinced spam will be a bigger problem in the future, and 68% see value in smarter spam management to "filter my email so I only get those messages I'm probably interested in."

More than half the managers believe 30% or more of their email is spam today...and rising fast.

According to 45% of managers who receive 50 or more emails a day, they're forced to spend at least 10 minutes each hour of email activity wading through spam.

For an executive paid $50 per hour, that is at least $8 every hour squandered on spam.