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.

Related posts:

1. Google’s Postini suffers outage, still down for some
2. 12% of people stupid enough to shop through spam
3. Twitter needs to act urgently on direct message spam