Spam Takes Up 10% Of Your Time
from the costly-enough,-yet? dept
A new study in the UK shows that dealing with spam costs employees approximately 10% of their working day. Maybe I just don’t get that much spam (though it certainly feels like I do), but 10% seems a tad excessive. I’d be the first to agree that spammers deserve (at least) lifetime jail sentences, but how could it take that long to simply delete spam? While we’re on the subject of spam, I’ve been hearing more and more about spam whitelist solutions where you only let people you “approve” to send you email. I have some reservations about whitelists (mostly because I don’t think it’s fair to inconvenience legitimate people who want to email me), but I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has been using them successfully.
Comments on “Spam Takes Up 10% Of Your Time”
SpamNet
Mike, if you are running MS Outlook you might want to try SpamNet from CloudMark (www.cloudmark.com). It works on the client side of things but seems to do a great job. I figure it is now catching approximately 75% of spam and I don’t have to even bother deleting it anymore.
Note, I have no association with CloudMark. I’ve been looking for anit-spam tools for at least a year and this is the only one I’ve found to be useful.
Re: SpamNet
I love the idea of Spamnet and have perused their site often…and I hate that their priority is Outlook.
As soon as they get a client for any other non-ms software, I’ll switch to it so I can use it (I’m using Pegasus Mail right now which is awesome, I wish they had a plug in for it….or let some programmer submit one).
Re: SpamNet
Mike, if you are running MS Outlook you might want to try SpamNet from CloudMark (www.cloudmark.com). It works on the client side of things but seems to do a great job. I figure it is now catching approximately 75% of spam and I don’t have to even bother deleting it anymore.
Yeah, I’ve been hearing good things about CloudMark, but I don’t use Outlook, so that rules out that idea, unfortunately.
BS
The sole source of the study appears to be MessageLabs, a company that specializes in ‘e-mail security.’ Obviously they have a vested interest in the results. I couldn’t find anything explaining how they arrived at that 10% figure, but I think it’s interesting that this was a telephone survey, in which they called over 1344 people in order to find 160 to interview. Perhaps those 160 who have nothing better to do than answer survey questions are self-selected for poor time management and might actually spend that much time carefully reading their spam before deleting it — or claim that they do anyway.
No Subject Given
I sort of have a whitelist setup in Pocomail, which is my mail client of choice. I have the built in spam filters set on high sensitivity, plus anything from yahoo, hotmail, excite, etc automatically goes to the spam folder. Its all client side filtering, so I am still downloading everything. When a friend with a hotmail address sends email to me, it will go to the spam folder the first time. Its a simple right click operation to override the rule set for a particular address. I’d guess 90% of the spam goes to the spam folder, where it is quickly deleted after a quick scan of the headers to make sure it is all spam.
Re: No Subject Given
I sort of have a whitelist setup in Pocomail, which is my mail client of choice. I have the built in spam filters set on high sensitivity, plus anything from yahoo, hotmail, excite, etc automatically goes to the spam folder. Its all client side filtering, so I am still downloading everything. When a friend with a hotmail address sends email to me, it will go to the spam folder the first time. Its a simple right click operation to override the rule set for a particular address. I’d guess 90% of the spam goes to the spam folder, where it is quickly deleted after a quick scan of the headers to make sure it is all spam.
Interesting. The thing I’m really wondering about, though, is how people react to whitelists that require them to “apply” or “respond” in some way to be included on the whitelist – unlike your solution which puts the burden entirely on you.
I like some of the whitelist idea, but I don’t want to annoy people who happen to email me, and aren’t on the whitelist – or friends who have mulitple email addresses, or suddenly get a new email address, or who knows what else.
Re: Re: No Subject Given
I like some of the whitelist idea, but I don’t want to annoy people who happen to email me, and aren’t on the whitelist – or friends who have mulitple email addresses, or suddenly get a new email address, or who knows what else.
I don’t think I’d be real annoyed if my first email to you required some sort of reply to confirm I am a real person sending email. If I had to do it every time I’d get annoyed quick! My mother uses privacy guard on her phone. Non-approved callers are automatically sent to voice mail without the phone ever ringing. Sort of the same idea.
A compromise that might work and keep your inbox sane is something that would only download “approved” mail and leave the rest on the server, to be automatically deleted after it sits there 7 days. That would allow the user time to check the server spam pile a couple of times a week for mail that should have come through. I think Spamcop may work like that. And I’m pretty sure I could write a Pocomail mail script (it has a proprietary scripting language) to do it too.