Watching the Watchers

How much spam did you get today?

That very question is in itself such a cliché it's spam in print. We're assaulted on one side by nonsensical or insulting or frantic or overblown spam messages…and on the other side by “voice of doom” pronouncements using scare tactics to sell software or equipment designed to eliminate spam.

One company, Ironport, estimates that 120 billion spam messages hit various screens every day. Now, how did they tote up that number? I know, I know…they assigned four bright interns, and each of them counted 30 billion spam messages over the course of a day. Hey, guys, with 6 billion humans on the planet, that's 20 a day, including infants, Inuits, and those guys deep in “The Gods Must Be Crazy” Africa who actually speak in clicks.

Another company, Infocrossing, says, “Analysts estimate that unwanted messages cost companies nearly $2,000 annually per employee.” So? Coffee breaks cost more than that. What does the installation and maintenance of spam protective devices cost, per employee? And how about the time employees use to send personal messages? Is it really time lost or sanity saved? Being able to pour occasional soothing oil onto the flood of hard-nosed business messages is what keeps workers, locked into their keyboards, from that dreadful syndrome, Keyboard Overboard Madness.

(Four years ago, Solinus, which bills itself as “the leader in e-mail protection and hosting products and services,” declared that organizations with 5,000 un-spam-protected e-mail users were wasting 10 minutes per end-user per day on spam, and 43 minutes per day per IT staff member. Its conclusion: “The ensuing drain claims nearly $4.2 million in lost productivity per year” for a company of that size.)

AppRiver® has a program called SecureTide™ that “intercepts messages before they reach the clients infrastructure to prevent high impact attacks such as Denial of Service (DOS) and Directory Harvesting programs from stealing email processing resources.” Now, preventing attacks is a sound concept and no one should attack its value. Sometimes, though, sophistication trumps logic.

Who watches the watchers? That's the inevitable question, and few in our world of communications question the wild ability of spam protectors to eliminate valuable messages along with the detritus. Just ask Google, whose spam-blocker did such a powerful blocking job a number of legitimate users couldn't get messages they wanted.

While we're considering Google, consider this: If you Google the phrase “spam filter” you'll awaken about 9 million entries. Last time I looked, one of the early listings was “Spam Filter Review,” which evaluated various spam filters by criteria such as ease of installation, ease of use, features, effectiveness in blocking, and whitelists. (If the word “whitelist” seems almost familiar but not quite, it's a reasonable conclusion because a factor such as an e-mail source that's whitelisted is the opposite of an e-mail source that's blacklisted.) The originator of Spam Filter Review isn't apparent, suggesting the results are cunningly loaded…but prices range from $19.95 to $49.95, a joke when comparing these recommended apparent protectionsand safeguards against the Big Boys.

If you're online more than 20 seconds a day, you must have had an inadvertent and unasked filtration (read: deletion) of a message your online supplier recognizes as spam but you don't. I've sent a message and had the response to my message wind up in the spam file. I also have had situations where AOL kicks out a message but one of my other online addresses lets it through the gate…and vice versa. “Free shipping” still seems to outpull any other online marketing incentive even though it's on the search-and-destroy list of most spam filters.

We live in an imperfect electronic wonderland, and spam is as much a fact of life as malaria: It's out there, and others may suffer from it, but we wonder whether the cost of suppression drugs is a worthy investment. Common sense isn't all that common; yet, if we have to monitor our employees' monitors, doesn't that make a nasty statement about the competence of our HR people?

What's it all about, Alfie? OK, OK, let's accept the notion that eliminating spam from business computers saves money. Convincing employees to not use their computers for personal messages (or personal Googling) also would save money.

You can start now by not Googling any references made in this diatribe.

---

HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS (www.herschellgordonlewis.com) is the author of 31 books, including the recently published “Creative Rules for the 21st Century.” He's also written “Hot Appeals or Burnt Offerings,” the curmudgeonly titled “Asinine Advertising,” and “Effective E-mail Marketing.”