Understanding the Cost of Spam

Between my main two accounts, I get about 200 pieces of spam daily. SpamButcher catches but about 3 to 6 of those. What if I didn't have SpamButcher on duty blocking e-mail I don't want?

How long would it take me to sort through 200 emails? If we figure 10 seconds per message, that comes out to 2000 seconds daily. That's roughly a half hour each day.

Let's assume my time is worth about $20 an hour. I'd like to think its worth more than that, but I think it's a fairly typical figure. By that measure, spam would be costing me about $3600 annually.

Of course, most users with a spam problem so serious would likely invest in anti-spam software. In the case of SpamButcher, it's a one time cost of about $30. Following my test case, the product would pay for itself in about 3 days.

There's also costs incurred by ISPs who handle bandwidth used by spammers. Most service providers have also installed e-mail filters on their servers. Sometimes this software is free, but installing and maintaining it is not.

An indirect cost of spam is the email that's incorrectly intercepted by programs intended to filter junk email. SpamButcher is pretty good about not doing this. Some messages such as those from mailing lists are more prone to get filtered. Its much more difficult to put a dollar value on this cost.

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