Because the Internet is open to the world, a network left unprotected to spam is a houseboat with the basement door left open.Spam accounted for 64 percent of the e-mail messages processed by Brightmail in May . . .
Because the Internet is open to the world, a network left unprotected to spam is a houseboat with the basement door left open.

Spam accounted for 64 percent of the e-mail messages processed by Brightmail in May 2004, while Postini processed 78 percent for the same period. Our own internal logs show that up to 87 percent of incoming messages (including worms and viruses) are flagged as undesirable. No matter how you slice it, the majority of all e-mail sent today is junk.

The costs for transporting and processing this junk is high. Say a user at an average company gets 30 legitimate e-mail messages per business day, this user presumably would receive about 70 junk messages per day. At an average transfer size of 3 KB per message and 22 working days per month, each unique recipient could receive almost 5 MB of undesired data each month. For an organization with 100 employees, that's as much as 500 MB of Nigerian money scams or strangers intent upon enhancing your love life, all of which has to be transferred and stored.

The link for this article located at Eric A. Hall, Network Computing is no longer available.