Don’t be left in the dark -- spam’s hidden costs include lost bandwidth, wasted storage capacity and even unnecessary server processing. Failing to add up these costs means that you might not really know how much spam is hurting you.

Unsolicited e-mail, or "spam", cost European businesses an estimated two-and-a-quarter-billion euros (£1.5bn) in lost productivity last year, according to the European Commission. Employees waste increasing amounts of their time deleting junk emails.

According to recent statistics, pornographic spam has increased by 380 per cent since November 2001 and 45 per cent of all email is unsolicited. Microsoft blocks about 2.4 billion junk emails a day, some 80 per cent of the messages that hit MSN servers. BT Openworld estimates that, of the 25 million emails that it monitors, 41 per cent is spam. Worse, these emails are creating a corporate headache for IT managers, as they seek to limit the number of spam emails clogging the company network. There is also the fear that such emails could hide viruses, which then infect the network.

Under new legislation, companies will have to get permission from an individual before they can send them an e-mail or text message. But the regulations do not cover business e-mail addresses, despite some calls for a blanket ban on spam. "From 11 December2003 it is effectively legal to send spam to the millions of hapless employees of British businesses. Britain's firms are open to increasing levels of unsolicited mail.

By using a proprietory Content Filtering software such as MailMarshal, clients can take steps to combat and contol unsolicited email, please see the software section or click here for further information on MailMarshal.