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Managed spam, anti-virus and content filtering for email from BlackSpider Technologies

People have differing views on the definition of spam, but there is one fact that everyone agrees with: spam is on the rise. Although there are no complete figures about the volume of spam Europeans receive, observers claim that up to 70% of all e-mail traffic is junk mail, and it is spreading so fast that it may render the e-mail system unusable before the end of 2005.

Direct costs of spam
The direct costs of spam relate to the receiving and storage of unwanted e-mails. Delivering spam costs the enterprise in terms of both Internet bandwidth and disk storage. Once received, each unwanted message has to be stored until it is read and/or deleted by the user. In many cases the e-mail remains in the deleted items folder on the network even after it has been discarded. It is easy to underestimate the bandwidth costs associated with spam delivered to the enterprise: If 50% of a company's network traffic is e-mail and 50% of that email is spam (a conservative figure - Gartner estimates that it could be up to 80%) then it follows that 25% of that company's overall bandwidth cost is being used solely to download spam. Although the cost of a single spam message to an individual user is small, the aggregate cost of spam messages directed at business today is becoming a board-level concern.

Indirect costs of spam
Spam has a negative effect on employee productivity throughout the enterprise. For e-mail administrators, their time is increasingly becoming focused on spam; how to either prevent it from entering the enterprise, or how to manage it when it does. For the end user, managing and deleting unwanted messages is both frustrating and time-consuming. It is estimated that the average end user receives four unwanted e-mails per day, and that previewing or opening and deleting these takes an average of 10 seconds per message. Taken in isolation these figures seem small, but using this metric, a company with 500 workers would lose 166 employee days every year dealing with spam!

All of BlackSpider's MailControl Services are outsourced and managed, with no requirement for hardware or software to be installed, managed and maintained at your premises. The results are a hassle free solution to an area of the business which can take up a lot of time, energy and resources.

BlackSpider offers the most up-to-date e-mail security available, using a combination of the market leading security products on the market and its own proprietary systems. The BlackSpider operations centre constantly analyses e-mail to identify new spam and virus patterns, continually adapting its service to ensure the best possible protection.

For more information visit www.blackspider.com or call Ultima on 0870 60 86 860.