There have been many estimates of what percentage of emails are spam, most estimates seem to be around 70%.

If a member of staff spends just 12 minutes a day dealing with spam and if that person is being paid minimum wage, the per annum loss to the employer is well over £200, if you have just five members of staff in that position, that's well over £1000 per annum. Unless you are using a broadband connection you could easily add £50 to your telephone bill.

Some spam consists of images of very hard porn which contravenes the UK anti-pornography laws and can be very upsetting for many.

So what can you do ?

There are various packages for your PC

• Some are free, some are not.
• Some work well, others do not.
• Some simply filter spam into another account to be dealt with/deleted manually.
• Some simply delete anything they think is spam.

Check what is being offered carefully.

The ECSWeb Anti-Spam service:

Uses a system used by ISP's and other major institutions and companies on over 30,000 servers. Collectively these servers deal with more than 750 million e-mail messages every day removing over 10 million viruses and identifying 300 million spam messages.

Identifies a minimum of 95% of all spam.

One of the disadvantages of running anti-spam software on your own PC is that usually you still have to download all of your email before it can be dealt with and then of course you have to maintain and manage the system yourself.

Employing a system operated on the mail servers relieves you of these tasks and allows you to get on with more important things.

Whilst we do include some anti-virus checking, this should be considered to be a first line of defence only and you should continue to run your own anti-virus programs.

We can offer a variety of options from filtering single elected mailboxes up to corporate filtering for an entire domain.

Prices for our service vary dependent upon the service you require. If you wish to filter on a per elected mailbox basis, the first costs £29.95 and each mailbox thereafter costs just £9.95 per annum. If you wish to filter on a per domain basis or a large number of addresses, please contact us.

For more information on spam, click on these links :

How the ECSWeb Anti-Spam Service Works

The What, Where, Why, When & How of Spam