The fight against spam doesn't promise to ring up more revenue or slash the costs of doing business. But make no mistake: Fighting spam has become a priority for most businesses, and the backlash is leaving business-technology execs with no choice. . . .
The fight against spam doesn't promise to ring up more revenue or slash the costs of doing business. But make no mistake: Fighting spam has become a priority for most businesses, and the backlash is leaving business-technology execs with no choice. They must fight the battle or suffer the consequences -- maybe both.

The results of a new InformationWeek Research survey make it clear that not everyone is gearing up for all-out war. Just over a third of 550 business-technology executives say eliminating spam is a high priority in their companies. The majority say it's a moderate priority, but maybe that's because they're so busy with more mission-critical IT projects. Or maybe they haven't yet heard from senior executives demanding that spam be kept out of their in-boxes. "If you don't get it under control, it's a very visible problem," says Lowell Mattox, VP of internal technology at MasterCard International. "You can get black eyes on this in a hurry."

Get out the ice packs and raw steak. Only about 25 percent of respondents say their companies have extremely effective spam-filtering controls. (For more on various spam-fighting strategies, see Employing Multiple Anti-Spam Strategies.) More than half don't even track how much spam comes in the door, but 86 percent of respondents who do track it say the situation is getting worse every month. For example, in July, half of MasterCard's 800,000 inbound messages were tagged as spam, compared with one-quarter of 400,000 messages in February, Mattox says. That's a fourfold increase in spam volume.

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