It was spam overload. Inboxes at a certain Fortune 50 energy company were packed with unsolicited e-mail, making it difficult for users to find important messages. Worse, the spam content was getting downright raunchy, creating a liability problem for the organization. "It was beyond foul," says Dave Giaramita, an internal IT consultant for the company.

And every user complaint landed squarely on the shoulders of IT.

Spam currently makes up 25 percent to 35 percent of a company’s total mail volume, according to Joyce Graff, vice president and research director for e-mail at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner. And, she notes, if 25 percent to 35 percent of your company’s e-mail is spam, that’s a 25 percent to 35 percent inflation on your e-mail bandwidth and storage capacity.

Looking to stem the flow, the energy company’s IT department turned to a product from mail security vendor Tumbleweed Communications.

But it wasn’t until the IT staff installed the new software and had it working in conjunction with other spam-prevention measures?such as blocking mail identified by "real-time black hole lists" (RBLs) as originating from servers exploited by spammers?that Giaramita realized just how bad the spam problem had been. He estimates that these measures capture as many as a quarter-million spam messages each day.

"The cost of all that spam for a company this size was enormous," says Giaramita. He conservatively estimates that the company is saving between $100 million and $200 million per year in regained productivity and additional millions from not having to pay for the extra storage and bandwidth that that much spam requires.

Human Expense

Money isn’t the only cost associated with spam. It’s increasingly becoming an HR issue as well.

Graff notes that offensive spam makes employees feel like their employers don’t care about them because they don’t see the company trying to make the enterprise a place that’s conducive to work.

Many companies are even beginning to view offensive spam as a legal liability, following a precedent set at Chevron. In 1996, the oil company’s IT operating company spent $125 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought on by 777 female employees in response to a degrading e-mail that circulated inside the organization.

More recently, Utah residents have filed a class-action lawsuit against Sprint because the ISP failed to mark unsolicited e-mail as such, in violation of Utah’s Unsolicited Commercial and Sexually Explicit E-Mail Act.

From Bad to Worse

The spam situation isn’t improving, either. Graff says that spam has multiplied tenfold in the past year. And spammers have more tools than ever for digging e-mail addresses off the Internet. The economic downturn has increased the use of spamming as a low-cost way for desperate individuals to earn a buck. Enemies of the United States are even using spam as a weapon in their arsenals by bombarding American corporate servers with junk mail.