Fairy godmother magically appears and offers you a choice.

£1000 a day for the rest of your life, or 1p on day one, and then each day that figure would double. You have 3 seconds to decide. Decide now.

By the 10th day, you’ve received £10,000 if you chose the first option. It surprises many people, but if you choose the second option, you’d have received £20.47 already, and on the 10th day you had reached that total with a £5.12 instalment.

On day 20, if you chose the first option you’ve just been given another £1,000 and £20,000 in total. But if you chose the second option, you’ve just been given £5,242.88. In total, £10,485.75, so you’ve still lost.

The next 10 days are startling. On day 25, you receive £167,772.16, and in total you’ve had £335,544.31. Those who thought the £1,000 a day sounded better just got the same boring amount and £25,000 in total.

Day 30. You’ve just been handed £5,368,709.12 and have received over £10M in total.

£10M pounds in 30 days as opposed to £30,000 - itself a fantastic sounding deal for those who could quickly picture £365K a year with a bit of mental arithmetic.

Don’t believe me? Check out this spreadsheet which dramatically illustrates the doubling effect - even without a graph:

fairygodmother1.xls

Junk Mail Is The Same

There have been periods where the volume of junk email sent has been doubling every 6-8 weeks. I’ve not seen any recent news on this, but really hope it stops doubling at that rate. But even if it slows, it’s only a matter of time before it hits.

You haven’t noticed because when it originally starting exploding, people got spam filters. But local spam filters just aren’t keeping up with the pace and the spammers are getting clever - they are always one step ahead. So now you’re seeing them get through again.

Let’s apply that same example to one person. They have a spam filter, and on 1st January 2008 they are getting 10 spam emails a day slipping through the net into their inbox. Let’s double that 7 times throughout the year (every 7 weeks taking the middle figure from the various reports).

By the second half of February, it’s now 20 emails a day. You may not even notice that. It’s happened gradually. By the beginning of April it’s now 40 a day and you’re noticing and it’s becoming more than annoying. By the end of the year (after 7 increments), it’s now 640 a day.

In a company of 10 staff, that’s 6,400 getting through. Not to mention the number of spam emails that are still being captured by the exhausted spam filters struggling to keep up. For companies running a spam filter on their file server, suddenly, the file server is spending far too much of its time dealing with spam.

It’s working 24 hours a day - the spammers all live in different time-zones and even while we’re all awake and they are asleep, they’ve set their spam to keep going out 24/7. There was still an awful lot of junk going out Xmas day!

The Effects On A Small Business

Broadband. It’s slowing down. Have you noticed? That’s because your file server is constantly downloading spam and filtering it. Internet browsing means it takes longer to do your online banking, order stuff from a supplier or whatever it is you do on the web

Network Performance. Your file server and the amount of data being moved around which is junk is slowing things down. Opening and saving a document takes a second or few longer. Not a big deal, but you open and close documents tens of thousands or more times a year in a typical small business. It adds up.

Server Life. It’s a bit like air miles for an aeroplane. The number of hours they are in the air is important to judge it’s life. A file server is on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But it wasn’t always in the air. At night, once the back-up was complete, it would get a rest. That means the processors would cool a bit while not in use. The longer the processors and other components run at a higher temperature, the shorter life the server has. But they don’t get anywhere near as much rest processing junk 24/7.

Timewasting. Hitting the delete key as each one comes through. Or being duped into reading one before they realise.

What Can You Do?

The answer is simple. Stop the junk before it touches your network. Use a specialist service to filter out the spam so 98% doesn’t get through in the first place. It takes the strain off your network, gives you that bit more broadband speed and has your file server doing fewer air miles.

More importantly, it prevents staff losing time increasingly hitting the delete key or worse, reading those they are duped into opening and wasting time.

One Client’s Experience

We become the IT department for most of our clients. Our motivation is to keep your network stable and IT experience as smooth as possible. So we research and investigate solutions to emerging threats.

So I thought I’d relay the experience of a client. In fact when we issued a warning about spam volumes not so long ago, we accidentally included him on a circular recommending clients adopted a spam filtering service rather than software running on the server or PC. We act as a back-stop for some clients who have in-house experts. Here’s what he said:

SPAM? What SPAM? From 09/03 until 04/06 we had an ever increasing torrent of SPAM mail. Although we had good quality local network solutions in place, the ever escalating levels of rough emails being handled by the server caused a great deal of instability and downtime. Indeed, the last six months, for me, became something of an admin’ nightmare. Constantly checking, seven days a week, that everything was working as it should to keep the clients working as best as possible. (Something of a pain for a one man department).

However, since April all that has changed. With the adoption of Messagestream, and a new server, SPAM as we knew it is a thing of the past. Messagestream is blocking somewhere in the region of 20,000+ emails a day! Junk that used to be processed here. Junk that would from time to time cause our Exchange Server to hang requiring a reboot and network wide disturbance to recover from. It’s now quite rare to get SPAM mail here. I only wish it had been available 3 years ago!

It may sound like I’m on commission, but I’d never go back to using local filtration as my first line defence. It’s simply not worth the hassle. Messagestream has more than paid for itself many times over and I’d have now hesitation recommending it to anyone.

So, as I said at the start. SPAM? What SPAM? I think we’re as covered as we can be. Unless you know different?”

His last words were questioning why we were asking him when he had it already - it was an accident he got it, but very useful feedback because it illustrates the effect it can have once out of control.

Want To Eradicate 98% Of Your Junk BEFORE It Even Gets To You?

We recommend it because it makes our clients’ lives easier and from our point of view reduces support calls. We can co-ordinate the switch, configure it on your server and finally get rid of your junk mail challenge.

Please leave a comment telling us how many email addresses you have (remember addresses such as “sales@…” or “info@…”). An estimate is fine. And please enter your own email address so I can get the quote to you (your email address is not published on this site or shared with anyone else).

We’ll get you a costing across.

More:

The Hidden Drain On A Small Business Network

Email Fatique, Overload, And How To Cope Better Than Ever