No One Has Any Idea How Much Work Email Is Spam

Can we just say, for the record, that no one actually has a good handle on how much spam is out there? This is absolutely true when it comes to corporate email accounts.

In 2001, we had a report that said that only 21% of all emails were work related, with the rest being junk or personal emails… but a year later the story was that office employees don’t get much spam at work. Last year, a report came out saying that spam made up 33% of office email, which seems lower than the other studies (which also said another 25% of work emails were personal, and thus 42% — twice of that earlier study — were work related).

The latest such study claims a flip of that original stat: 21% of corporate emails are spam. So, basically, over the past few years, we’ve had reports of lots of spam and not very much spam at all when it comes to the office — suggesting that, frankly, no one really knows how much spam there is in the office. Also, to be honest, the aggregate number is pretty useless, as different companies (and different people within a company) probably face vastly different levels of “spam threat.”

So, rather than focusing on how much corporate email is spam, why not focus on how effective (or not) IT departments are at stopping the spam from those who are most targeted?