There are two factor to consider when Calculating the cost of Spam.

1. Loss of wages
2. Loss of productivity

It is hard to know for sure, but I estimate it is AT LEAST $50,000+ per year in lost wages and productivity for a company of 250 employees.

From some of the studies I have found, a pretty conservative estimate is that the average American employee spends 14 minutes per week deleting
spam.

14 Minutes * 52 week / 60 = 12 hours per year (roughly)

Assuming the average employee earns $25 dollars per hour (might be much higher with benefits & etc.)

12 hours * 25 $ph * 250 employees = $75,000 per year wasted.

A rather high number, but this doesn’t even include losses in productivity, because the employee wasn’t doing billable work.

The number could easily climb into the hundreds of thousands.

You could have a pretty high ROI if you use the Open Source SpamAssassin server. It might only cost a few thousand dollars in labor.
Most commercial spam solutions could cost $35->$100, per user, per year.

Really Cool Spam Cost Calculators

http://www.filterpoint.com/roi.html
http://www.electricmail.com/Perimeterprotect/Spam_Filtering/Spam_ROI.php
http://www.commtouch.com/Site/Resources/calculator.asp
http://www.networkworld.com/spam/index.jsp

Reference
How much time is spent on deleting spam emails (Google Answers)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Spam, SpamAssassin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.