Spam nightmare

Half of all inbound business email is spam, according to Australia’s National Office for the Information Economy.

It’s cheap to send and some of it must be working. But that is small consolation for businesses wasting time and money protecting staff from it. According to Mark Bender, who writes for The Age, the annual estimated cost to business from unsolicited email is $9.5 billion. This includes productivity loss, technical costs and losses from fraud.

It’s a global problem he argues and it requires a global solution. The Australian Government is negotiating bilateral agreements on spam control and is working with the OECD and the International Telecommunications Union in the development of multilateral responses.

Bender says more resources and international co-operation are needed to address the problem.