Why is Spam Mail Bad?
When an individual receives a dozen spam messages each week, it may be very annoying, but surely it is tolerable.
On the corporate level, where the problem is multiplied by hundreds and thousands, spam is more than a nuisance. It is a theft of resources, costly, and wastes employee time. By some estimates, currently 15 percent of all Internet email is spam.
Spam mail is at the very least annoying, but it can also be offensive, dangerous, and illegal.
If spamming continues, successful, inexpensive, and unabated, it is not hard to imagine a future where everyone in the world with a political opinion, a rant, or a rave will pay a few hundred dollars a pop to bulk emailers to push/publish their views to millions of people. In other words, be prepared for a future of weekly "newsletters" and high volumes of spam.
Spam blasts can bog down your network, as bandwidth is consumed in delivering hundreds of unwanted email messages.
Spam mail wastes time and is distracting. Just to delete spam, email clients must first identify who the messages are from and what they are about. Even careful users risk deleting legitimate messages while trimming spam from their Inbox.
Spam mail serves no corporate interest, yet uses the corporate SMTP server(s) for processing and delivery. It uses CPU, takes up space on the server hard drive, and on the hard drives of countless end-users. Even when the messages have been deleted, it can take weeks before the messages are permanently deleted by the user, and months before the server backups cycle through.
Outbound spam mail, when sent through the corporate SMTP server by either an employee (advertising his/her own business, for example) or relayed by an unauthorized third-party user, puts the corporation at risk. Indeed, certain types of spam are illegal.
Spam mail multiplies the risk of widespread virus attacks by simultaneously exposing many people to the same infected file, or URL with a malicious Java or ActiveX application.
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