Q: My employees time is being wasted going through spam email.

A: An average sized company with 10 email addresses each receiving 10 spam emails per day will lose £10,312.50 per annum in employee productivity by having to filter through emails just like what you are doing right now.

Spam is unsolicited email, often containing offensive content accounting for 90-95% of all emails. Moreover, in the context of the credit crunch, spammers (who have a track record of playing on recipients' fears and failings) are trying to take advantage of anxious businesses with get rich quick schemes.

You have no control over your employees opening emails that
could damage your network.

The problem with this increasingly sophisticated threat is that a lot of messages look genuine but the reality is if once mistakenly opened, they can unleash viruses or programmes which capture and send back business sensitive information such as log on IDs and passwords.

By this time it is too late as the threat has entered into your IT network. Then depending on the level and how up to date your anti-virus protection is, any threats unknowingly downloaded may affect your IT network.

You may already have a basic level of email spam protection that just requires being switched on? The issue with this though is that the spam has already entered your network and overtime will slow down the running of it.
There are anti-spam products available; some come in the form of an appliance which sits on your network. The initial capital outlay can be high and then you have additional hardware to maintain.

Alternatively there are internet based products (Software-as-a- Service) which cleanse your email and pass it to you, all done at a fraction of a second so as not to delay you receiving your emails. Additional features include email back up allowing you to retrieve any lost emails up. This type of service is for a fixed fee, based on the number of email accounts, with no on-going maintenance or
support costs.

Whatever option from the above you choose to do, you will
be making steps to improve your IT security and employee
productivity.