One of the most asinine calculations used in making the case against spam is the one that says employees spend ‘X’ amount of time on average dealing with unsolicited e-mail, therefore, it costs ‘Y’ in terms of lost productivity.
The United Nations has made this argument. The University of Maryland has made it. The list goes on.
Most recently, a post on the Royal Pingdom blog—Pingdom provides uptime monitoring services—calculated that based on statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor, the average minute of an American worker’s time is worth about 30 cents. The blog post also estimated there are about 86 million U.S. workers who have regular computer contact.
“This means that for every minute lost for those 86 million workers, $26.1 million goes down the drain.”
This argument assumes any minute spent dealing with spam would ordinarily be spent productively elsewhere. As a colleague pointed out, by this logic, we should all be wearing catheters.
However, Royal Pingdom takes this silly argument a step further and claims a minute is not nearly enough time to deal with the average inbox’s spam on a daily basis.
According to the post, five minutes a day is much closer to the time the average employee spends dealing with spam per day. Using the five-minute calculation, the post concludes that spam costs $130.5 million a day or $33.9 billion a year.
Five minutes? Apparently the average worker have ping-pong paddles for hands. Who the heck spends five minutes a day managing unsolicited e-mail?
I have three e-mail accounts: a work account, a Gmail account and a Yahoo account. I use the work and Gmail accounts all day everyday. I use the Yahoo account to sign up for e-mail from organizations I think seem as if they may spam me.
Even when managing the Yahoo account—which has been slaughtered a few times as a result of my experiments—I probably spend less than 10 seconds a day on average dealing with spam. When the Yahoo inbox gets polluted, I spend a few minutes highlighting the spam e-mails and hit the “this is spam” button and, voila!, Yahoo diverts future unwanted mail from those senders to my spam folder—that is, as long as those senders aren’t getting blocked altogether because other are complaining, too.
I don’t think even that process takes five minutes.
This is not to say spam isn’t a problem. It sucks up IT bandwidth and resources, exposes people to filth and viruses, and the world would be a much better place without it.
But to pretend that the average American worker is spending any real amount of time managing unsolicited e-mail is pure nonsense.
And for those who are tempted to write in to say how swamped their inboxes are with the stuff: Get a Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo account. They’re free of charge and generally free of spam.
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