Fastcompany.com is reporting that 107 trillion emails were sent in 2010 and that 89% were spam.  Both of these figures are staggering.  But it got us thinking.  Can we estimate the global productivity cost of spam?

While only a fraction of the spam sent gets to an inbox, what does get through can quickly consume a lot of time.  One phishing spam message alone can result in a costly security breach, involving numerous and well-paid IT and security personnel to clean up the mess.  Then there is the productivity cost of employees sifting through in-boxes full of spam to try to find the messages they need to take action on.  What about the costs of dealing with legitimate messages that get blocked by misconfigured or overly zealous spam filters? (ie. false positive)

So, let’s estimate that half a second is the average time spent by the recipient per spam message sent.  Next, let’s estimate the average wage of the recipient is $10 per hour.  From this we should be able to come up with the approximate global productivity cost of spam in 2010.

Number of Emails sent:  107 trillion
Number of Spam messages sent: 95 trillion
Time spent processing spam:  13.2 billion hours
Productivity cost of spam: $132 billion dollars

As a leader at your company, what are you doing to prevent spam from eroding your productivity and stealing your company’s profits?