Absurd Stat of the Week: Deleting spam costs billions

It costs American businesses more than $22bn a year to delete spam, according to a new study from the University of Maryland.
The National Technology Readiness Survey produced by Rockbridge Associates worked out this figure by adding up the number of people who receive spam, multiplying that figure by the number of spam emails they receive and calculating the average time spent deleting them.
Since the average number of spams is about 18.5 a day [cough. Ed.] it takes 2.5 minutes of your life to delete them. If you multiply this by the average cost of an employee and divide by your shoe size you get the figure of $22bn.
According to Associated Press, 14 per cent of spam recipients actually read messages to see what they say, and four per cent of the recipients have bought something advertised through spam within the past year. Interestingly enough, this figure must be about the same figure for the cost of allowing your employees to go to the toilet. It would be double that if they took a newspaper. With billions wasted like this, it is a wonder anyone in America makes any money at all You can gasp at all the figures here.