What's your Spam Index? Why do I care?

In a study released just on Tuesday this week, The Problem With Email, I measured the anti-spam performance of 500+ business people. They told me how many spam messages they typically get on any given day.  They told me how many times they had asked someone to resend a message in the past month. They told me how many minutes they spent dealing with spam (deleting messages is the #1 action) each day. They also told me how many messages are trapped (as far as they know) by their spam filters.

It is these four functions that create the Spam Index:

• Average number of spam messages each day x 20 (to get approximate number per work-month)
• Average minutes spent dealing with spam each day x 20 (to get approximate minutes per work-month)
• Number of resend requests last month
• Number of good messages trapped last month

This is the Spam Index.

 July 21, 2007 Addendum:

The Spam Index Report – Comparing Real-World Performance of Anti-Spam Technologies describes how the Spam Index is used as a means to compare how various technologies compare.

The Spam Index Calculator automates these calculations into a nice personalized web report. 

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