Spam Emails affect productivity and waste hundreds of work hours.

Emails are considered to be the most reliable and official source of communication. On average every working professional sends 40 emails per day. Thanks to Microsoft 365 productivity tool Outlook and Google workspace suite app Gmail, emails are the most preferred form of official communication. They are secure and keep a record of all the communications. With all these goods there is a side effect to the emailing system. That side effect is spam email!

Spam emails can be phishing emails or sometimes pointless email messages. Often perceived as nothing just an inconvenience or interruption. However, in reality, they affect our productivity as we have to scroll through or filter them to check useful important emails.

Security Boulevard – a cybersecurity company analyzed in a report that between 45% to 85% of total emails are spam emails. This also includes malicious emails ad malware-carrying emails.

However, not every employee receives the same amount of spam emails. Neither do they tackle them in the same manner. Often people who receive up to 30 emails per day; receive around 30 spam emails every week. It takes them approx. 5 hours every year to sort them.

More emails equal more spam

Then come those who receive up to 60 external emails every day. They spend roughly 11 hours per year sorting them. Then comes the people who receive more than 100 emails a day and spend up to 80 hours a year managing their inboxes.

For anyone spending 5 hours a year does not sound like a problem however there are concealed dangers that should not be ignored.

If we calculate these hours for organizations with hundreds of employees, this can turn into quite the amount of employee hours. Similarly, in the case of businesses that require active public dealing via emails the amount of time wasted on email sorting will become greater and definitely troublesome.

Here we can point out the psychological aspect as well, as spam emails are abstract the employees get distracted. So, it takes them time to regain focus and work productively.

Although the side effects of spam emails are not that apparent however organizations should be wary of them. They should protect their employees by adding an extra layer of security into their system with anti-spam and anti-phishing tools.

Other than anti-spam tools and junk email functions enabled, businesses should provide training to their employees to recognize spam emails and implement email protection services.