Assessing the Impact of Unsolicited Commercial E-mail in a Large Corporation

Unsolicited commercial e-mail has become an increasing issue in corporate environments. This case study examines the impact of unsolicited commercial email (also known as spam) on the productivity of employees in the research division of a large global corporation. Questionnaires were utilized to assess the volume of spam that employees received in order to conduct an impact study. The results suggest that 68.8% of the internet messages received by the research division are spam and that employees receive an average of 4.46 spam messages per day. An employee was timed while sorting 315 e-mail messages that were a mixture of legitimate e-mail and spam. The employee averaged 3 seconds per message to determine if the message was legitimate.