Calculate How Much Spam Costs You

Spam’s annoying, but when you factor in the amount of time you spend dealing with it on the job, the numbers can add up.

At least, that’s Google’s message in its new ROI Calculator, designed to determine exactly how much money you or your business is losing because of spam. The system works by asking you the number of employees at your business, the number of annual workdays and the hourly salary for an average employee, the average number of spam messages received daily by employees, and how many seconds it takes them to deal with each one. It then calculates the lost salary and productivity, both per employee and across the whole company.

Now, it’s worth noting that this system is designed specifically to sell you on Google Message Security — the spam filtering service Google acquired from Postini last year and rebranded. But in spite of the marketing angle, it’s an interesting little tool to play around with (and the marketing portion of it is easy enough to ignore).

For comparison’s sake when it comes to your findings, some research conducted by Nucleus last year found an average American company loses $712 per employee on spam every year.