Economics of Spam

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© ESCOM Corp. 2000-2005

Our patented ASMTP technology dynamically detects behavior used by spammers and quarantines messages sent using those techniques (other patents pending). As described in ESCOM's white paper, ASMTP directly reduces the following costs of spam:

• Lost productivity. Ferris Research (cited in the 11/27/2000 Wall Street Journal) estimates lost productivity at $400 per employee per year by 2003. The May 2004 issue of Network Computing magazine cites an annual cost of $1400 per employee due to "lost productivity caused by spam." And it costs you even more if your employees follow-up by visiting advertised web sites or waste time trying to track down spammers and argue with them.
• Lost opportunity. Conventional wisdom dictates that you should avoid using your e-mail address on web sites or newsgroups, and that you should change your address every year or so in order to avoid spam. But this also interferes with desirable business interactions.
• Sleazy ads can create an unpleasant, even hostile, work environment. In today's legal environment, this may subject your business to lawsuits for not taking reasonable steps to address the problem.
• Stolen resources. Spammers use e-mail because it is nearly free... for them. But they steal your bandwidth, your computers, and your disk space to support their free advertising. If over 50% of all e-mail is spam, then what would it be worth to reduce the load on your email server by 50% today?

The Costs of Junk E-Mail Lost Productivity, Opportunity, Environment, and Resources	versus
Compare     the costs for your network

Using the Network Computing cost estimate ($1400 per user per year), ASMTP will pay for itself if you have two users. Using the Ferris Research cost estimates for 2003 ($400 per user per year), an ASMTP Appliance will pay for itself in one year if you have over 5 users. The Loftus article, cited above, also projects that spam will continue to increase, eight-fold in the next three years.

For organizations with 1000 users, ASMTP is priced at about $3.50 per user for a purchase and about $1.00 per user for an annual lease.