How Much Is SPAM Costing You?

Spam is everywhere. Originally, it referred to the unsolicited electronic messages that regularly piled up in email inboxes. However, within the last few years, this term has expanded to encompass all kinds of similar abuse. This includes search engine spam, instant message spam, comment spam in blogs, forum spam, guestbook spam, and even text-message spam.

The cost of SPAM

While you probably don’t think too much about it as your prune your inbox of unsolicited messages, spam costs you a lot in terms of time and productivity. Even worse, when your ISP charges increase, it may be partly due to spam. This is because spam results in increased bandwidth both for the senders and receivers.

Some monetary estimates, which take into account the increased bandwidth, the loss of productivity, place the cost of spam at $10-15 billion dollars per year! Not a small figure at all.

Why do people spam?

Usually, spammers are advertisers or identity thieves. The reason why they spam is because of the low costs to do so. It is very easy to acquire email lists and compared to other forms of advertising — such as cold calling, pay-per-click, search engine optimization, mass mailing, and sponsored ads — spam is virtually free and quick. And given that it isn’t easy to prosecute spammers, there is no incentive for them to stop.

So the way to minimize your costs due to spam, it is necessary to find effective methods to deal with it.

How to get rid of spam

If you currently delete spam messages manually, then you should consider an automated method. We address three of these methods below.

Email Spam

Your best defense against email spam is to prevent it from being delivered to your inbox. This is accomplished by using a spam filter or boxtrapper. With the right settings, it can be very effective at preventing spam emails from cluttering your inbox.

Comment and Form Spam

Many blogs, forums, and guest books enable users to leave comments or messages. Unfortunately, this is fine prey for spam. And even if you moderate every message before it is made live, this will require more and more of your time as your website becomes more popular. Fortunately, there are both preventative and automatic deletion solutions.

To prevent spam messages from being submitted, consider using some sort of captcha. A captcha is an image that displays distorted text or numbers. This is very effective against any automatically deployed spam because solving the captcha requires a set of human eyes to discern the characters. Unfortunately, captchas are not very accessible and may prevent some humans from using it.

As a result, there are some more accessible captchas. These usually ask questions, with the most popular asking simple arithmetic questions such as: 1+8 = ?. Arithmetic questions are prefered because they work regardless of the language of the visitor.

But sometimes, captchas aren’t the best solution or may destroy the aesthetic of a simple website. In this case, consider using a system which automatically recognizes spam based on IP addresses, content, and method of posting. This is similar to spam filters for emails. One popular spam filter that can be deployed on blogs, and message boards alike, is Akismet, an Automattic product. (Check out the website for more information.)

Even with the above prevention methods, some clever spam may be able to slip through. However, deleting a few messages is much better than having to delete the hundreds or thousands of messages that would otherwise get by.