the cost of an email
The company I work for has about 3,000 employees. I am always amazed at the cavalier attitude people take towards sending emails to world@company.com or region@company.com. I am also surprised that the company permits anyone to send emails to any and all distribution lists (DL.) That got me wondering about how much it costs to deliver an email? From pressing ’send’ to the arrival at the recipient’s mailbox (not including the time to write or read the content) of say, a 1K size email. I could not find any analysis that quantifies this cost, considering infrastructure, IT personnel and so on. I also have no real knowledge to estimate this cost… $0.000001? $0.001? If that cost was known, maybe companies would pay more attention to the amount of inter-mail spam.
The goal is to minimize unwanted emails and to reduce the traffic in the pipes. I think that permission to send emails to DLs should be tiered according to the sender’s hierarchal position in the corporation and to the size of the DL. For example, only VPs would be able to send emails to world@company.com; Sr. Directors to division@company.com and so on. Me? I’ll be able to send emails only to neighboring cubes :). This will prevent people from sending unwanted emails to uninterested people, protect people from themselves from “reply-all” fiascos, and reduce infrastructure and support costs for the company.
The other aspect of restricting people from sending email to DLs is information security. For example, the company has an incentive to prevent a disgruntled employee sending out confidential/sensitive/incriminating/vindictive information to every single employee.
* The guy from “Internet Security” has other related ideas I agree with.
May 4th, 2005 at 3:24 pm
I had the opportunity to calculate the cost of spam last year and do an economic justification for filtering.
The network costs are trivial as are the storage and processing costs. (On very old systems - such as mainframe based as well as some new systems you only store one copy of the e-mail - no matter how many times it is forwarded - since it is simply indexed).
The real cost is in the lost productivity of handling spam or other useless mail. The quicker you can delete it knowing you aren’t missing something important the lower the real cost. The internal e-mails are the most time consuming since you usually have to slog through a lot of noise to discover that your time is wasted. $1 per minute wasted is not a bad benchark to use.
As for distribution lists allowed from the Internet - we cut them off - except the few that are designed to be accessible, like info@mycompany.com.
May 10th, 2005 at 4:13 pm
Regarding sending emails to “world” aliases, recall an employee doing just this in response to a questionaire about a fitness center. A woman replied that she would like one, and some undersexed male coworker responded, to all, “You already look like you’re in great shape.” Nothing like letting the whole company know you’re a horndog in line for a sexual harassment lawsuit, is there!