Spam/Junk Mail is time & money...

Question:

How much junk mail do we really get (how much is stopped)?

I know one Monday morning this fall (2004) I had a lot more junk mail than usual.  So I looked at the stats:

Saturday
Total Internet messages 3040 (possibly a new record for us)
79% was deleted immediately
13% was marked BULK/QUAR (it does this because it’s not 100% certain).
7% was allowed through (it’s best guess was it was okay, but still some junk gets through)

Sunday
Total Internet messages 2629
71% was deleted immediately
12% was marked BULK/QUAR (it does this because it’s not 100% certain).
16% was allowed through (it’s best guess was it was okay, but still some junk gets through)

This is over 4000 messages that no one had to look at or delete, even with staff looking at 8 messages a minute that’s 500 minutes saved (for two days)...   Plus there are 1200 messages that people get a better idea not to read due to the BULK/QUAR headers.

Spam/Junk has increased tremendously on the Internet. These numbers are significantly higher than six months ago, some of those days we had numbers more like 1000-1500 a day.

Since we started using this system my complaints about inappropriate images (images that students could see when mail was opened) has almost completely stopped.  I’m hoping that’s due to no messages and not just the lack of complaining.

We could get them to tighten up the filters but odds are we’ll lose some real mail and we don’t want that to happen.