Unsolicited e-mail messages (spam) are causing Romanian Internet users hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, according to the estimates of Softwin, a company producing security software.
At present, there are 3.13 million Internet users in Romania, according to the Communications and Information Technology Ministry (MCTI). Various international studies show that in 2004, the annual damages caused by spam amount to 86 dollars for every mail address on the average. In line with calculations by Softwin, which has taken into consideration the fact that each of the 3.13 million Romanian internet users has at least one e-mail address, annual damages should reach a total of 269.1 million dollars, due to the time wasted on sorting out and deleting unwanted messages.
International research also shows that unsolicited electronic messages account for half of total e-mails received by a company. Such messages, generically called "spam", translate into storage space used on e-mail servers, useless internal traffic to deliver them to employees and distracting the attention of recipients.
But all this comes with a certain cost, particularly if we consider that, on the average, each e-mail user spends 50 minutes a day to check, sort out and delete unsolicited messages, which accounts for 10% of working time.
Analysts also say that, at an international level, the number of Internet users stands at 945 million, while losses caused by spam amount to 81.2 billion dollars, a figure that points to a 56% increase as compared to 2002.
Softwin, which is best known as the producer of BitDefender antivirus software, has recently launched two anti-spam solutions, one for workstations running Windows and one for Windows Mail Servers.
iuliana.cerchez@zf.ro
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