Spam Cost In Business Organizations

What is spam?

Spamming is considered as a form of computer abuse. Computer abuse is defined as: "The commission of acts involving a computer that may not be illegal but that are considered unethical". (Laudon & Laudon, 2006, p.169).

Spam itself is defined as: "Junk e-mail sent by an organization or individual to a mass audience of Internet users who have expressed no interest in the product or service being marketed". (Laudon & Laudon, 2006, p.169).

Is spamming and important management issue? Why?

* Spam costs for business are very high because of the computing and network resources consumed by billions of unwanted e-mail messages and the time consumed in trying to deal with these messages.

* 35% of business e-mail messages received is spam and reaching 50% by 2005 (Gartner Group)

* Average worker receives 13.3 spam messages per day, requiring around 6 minutes of working time to handle these messages. (Nucleus Research)

* Handling spam mail costs around $87 billion in the U.S alone. (Nucleus Research)

How is the issue of spam handled so far?

* Developing tight regulations in some countries, especially in Europe. In 2002, the European Parliament passed a ban on unsolicited commercial messaging where electronic marketing can be targeted only to people who have given prior consent.

* Although 33 states in the U.S have passed laws to restrict spamming, however this does not outlaw spamming but does ban deceptive e-mail practices by requiring commercial e-mail messages to display an accurate subject line, identify the true sender, and offer recipients an easy way to remove their names from e-mail lists. According to experts these U.S laws