Mailprotector analysis reveals true cost of employees managing spam, phishing emails and viruses 

The true cost of managing unwanted email could be costing the UK’s army of medium-sized businesses more than £34,000 a year each. This is according to an analysis of time spent on managing spam, phishing and other unwanted emails by Mailprotector, a cloud-based email security, management and hosting specialist.

Using filtering statistics* from its customers worldwide, Mailprotector analysed businesses with 150 employees over a 30-day period. Each employee receives 25 unwanted emails per day on average, which take around 5 seconds to open, glance at and delete, equating to almost one working day a year (6.94 hours).

Calculating employee costs, based on an average annual salary of £28,000, and factoring in support desk costs – based on the number and cost per support call – the losses can add up to a staggering £34,229.17 per year per company. This figure does not include downtime and other costs related to affected networks and hardware.

Scott Tyson, Sales Director EMEA, Mailprotector says: ”When you start looking at the number of unwanted emails we get every day, it really starts to add up. While it may seem like seconds to delete each one, we’re actually spending several hours a year. Once you then add in the cost of support calls, either to an internal help desk, or, for most medium-sized businesses via a third party IT supplier or Services Company, the costs really start to go up.

”For smaller companies this represents money straight off the bottom line, and for employees it is frustrating and time not well spent,” adds Tyson. ”The good news is that these losses can be drastically cut by having a reliable and affordable cloud-based email filtering solution in place.”

In 2014, the number of business emails sent and received per day was 108.7 billion worldwide (out of a total 196.3 billion). This figure is expected to grow at an average annual rate of 7% over the next four years, reaching 139 billion by the end of 2018, according to The Radicati Group’s Email Market Report (2014-2018) published in October 2014. Today, there are over 2.5 billion email users in total, expected to grow to 2.8 billion by the end of 2018.

* Source: Mailprotector filtering statistics (31 July-31 August 2014)