Did you know that the numerous spam mails you receive every day create a cost of $11,9 billions year in all throughout the world? According to the report published last week by Ferris Research, the spam mails are very detrimental to the world 7economy. Spam costs U.S. companies $8.9 billions a year and $ 2,5 billions are wasted because of spam in Europe.

A great waste of time

It is for certain that the most serious cost of the spam is the waste of time. The time that takes the user to delete spam messages or the time that takes the users to read the unsolicited e-mails is a waste of valuable working time. Moreover, it is a serious problem that some spam filtering programs sometimes delete the solicited e-mails as next to the spam mails. These anti-spam programs play a significant role in fighting spam and they are taking effective measures against spam; however, there are times, though infrequently, that they also make mistakes. An important e-mail that is deleted by anti-spam program, creates, needless to say, another serious cost.

According to a survey of Ferris Research users spend an average of 4,4 seconds to delete every spam message. At a first glance, this 4,4 seconds seems to be a small number; however it costs $4 billions to American economy because of the reduced worker productivity. As spam consumes computer resources the bandwidth that is used is to be increased, the companies buy more powerful servers and anti-spam services deployed cost an additional $3,7 billions to the economy.

Users are highly aware of the fact

Users' awarenes about spam mails is higher than their awareness a few years ago. According to a survey of Harris Interactive, the %80 of Internet users find spam as a disturbing nuisance. This percentage notably differs from the %49 of the previous year's survey. %74 of Internet users vote for the prohibition of spam messages. %14 of the users are uncertain about the prohibiton of spam and . Only %12 of the users are supporting the spam.

According to the survey, users are mostly disturbed by e-mails with pornographic content. Bu mesajları, finans ve emlak ilanları takip ediyor. The survey revealed that the amount of users' responses to the spam mails are very low. It is understood that most of the users delete spam mails before even reading them.

No research has been conducted in Turkey to find out about spam's costs to Turkish economy. However, it is an obvious fact that in Turkey the control over spamming lacks power of restraint; therefore spammers are more indifferent to public opinion or criticism. For instance, CDs are being created to be used for the purpose of spamming, even big companies are resorting to methods of spamming. In consequence, the opinions of the users are being neglected. The neglect about the issue of spamming is mainly due to the major factor that there is no legislation against spamming in Turkey. If there no rules or standards have been effected about such an issue as spamming, we can no longer talk about keeping order. Our request from the current government is that they immediately do the required investments in anti-spam solutions.

Eylem CÜLCÜLOĞLU
(From the article that is published in the 176th issue of the IT-Business Weekly journal)