Spam emails can be very irritating. It’s not only a pain to clear through your inbox but it can be a real productivity killer.
According to a recent report, each one of your employees could be losing up to 80 hours a year due to filters and the deletion of junk mail – that equates to a lot of lost productivity.
This brings us to the question…
How much spam email sits in your inbox?
Between 45% and 85% of the emails that are generated each day are junk mail. That also includes malicious emails and people trying to get you to install a piece of software on your computer.
What is malware?
You may or may not know but malware is intrusive software that is designed to damage and destroy computers and computer systems. It is unleashed onto a computer/laptop with the click of a button. It could be clicking to open an email or attachment.
This type of attack is called Phishing and it’s becoming more and more difficult to spot among other emails. This is because cybercriminals are getting better at crafting more sophisticated “real-looking” emails. You can read more about spotting phishing emails in a previous blog we wrote How to spot a phishing email
How much time is wasted looking through spam emails?
Even though we don’t all receive the same number of emails every day, the hours lost to filters adds up.
For example, if one of your employees received 30 external emails a day, they would get around 30 spam emails each week. It would take around 5 hours a year to sort through and remove them. An employee who gets up to 60 emails a day would waste an average of 11 hours a year. Around 80 hours of productivity are lost each year for someone who gets more than 100 emails a day.
You could be looking at a huge amount of time if you add up the numbers for each member of your team.
A large proportion of these emails will be phishing attempts, if you only glance over this email it’s a big risk to your data security.
How to reduce getting spam email
There are many ways to get rid of the amount of spam emails you receive, this is what we recommend:
- Unsubscribe from unwanted mailing lists
- To effectively stop spam emails, you’ll need to report and block the email
- Make use of the spam and junk email filters available from your email service.
- Implement dedicated anti-spam and anti-phishing tools.
- Staff training – how aware are your employee of the risks spam emails can bring? Do they know how to spot spam emails or the best way to deal with them to save time and minimise the risk of malware or a data breach?
If employee cyber security training is something your business is interested in, our expert technicians can assist you. Get in touch today on 01273 806211 or email [email protected]
