Low-rate loans, fast and easy weight loss, and get rich quick opportunities are only a click away in junk e-mails. Even junkier messages pester you with offers for generic Viagra and daily doses of unsolicited, offensive smutty pictures.
E-mail is a useful tool, providing convenient, low-cost communications for businesses and consumers alike. But it's rapidly being undermined by shady commercial entities that send millions of unwanted junk ads — known as spam — that clog e-mail systems. And the problem continues to grow.
A recent InsightExpress survey of 500 companies, conducted for Symantec, indicates that spam is an ever-increasing problem for small businesses. About 64 percent reported an increase in the volume of spam during the past six months, with 33 percent noting dramatic increases. Four in ten businesses said that spam comprised more than half of all incoming e-mail.
The reality is that spam e-mails arrive and company servers have to store them and employees — if not IT staff, then end users — have to delete them. Forty-two percent of the small businesses surveyed said they might abandon e-mail altogether if the situation worsened; 55 percent said that they'd be forced to change their company e-mail address; and 56 percent said they'd consider accepting only messages from preapproved sources, even at the risk of snubbing legitimate customer inquiries.
Low Cost and Low Response
Unfortunately, sending spam to thousands of e-mail addresses is easy. Since e-mail costs next to nothing to send, nabbing even a single sale from a hundred thousand messages is worth it to unscrupulous vendors. It's also cheap and easy to harvest e-mail addresses by using software to scan Web sites. But the cost to business in terms of productivity is significant.
Lawmakers are trying to deal with the problem, but despite recent national and state legislation, many spammers are located overseas, effectively out of reach. While major companies such as America Online, EarthLink and Microsoft file lawsuits against spammers, the junk e-mail keeps arriving. For now, small businesses are largely on their own in dealing with the deluge.
