AAA Spam Survey Results
by Roman H. Kepczyk, CPA.CITP (June 20, 2004) 

Most organizations rely on email to communicate with clients and other business associates.  Unfortunately, this valuable tool has been tarnished by an increase in the volume of unsolicited emails, usually referred to as spam, which is having an extreme negative impact on productivity in firms today.  To evaluate the depth of the problem, the Association for Accounting Administration and InfoTech Partners North America, Inc. conducted a survey in the Spring of 2004 which was sent to close to 600 member firms.  Below, we have summarized the key responses and findings of that survey, which included 100 actual respondents. 

When asked how spam has impacted the firm’s utilization or perception of email, most firms agreed that it was a nuisance and disruptive.  Firms also had the following to say, which shows the breadth of the problem and its related impacts:

• ”Most executives feel overwhelmed by the amount of e-mail received.”
• “E-mail has become a part of everyday business and when it is unavailable, you realize how much everyone is depending on it.  Staff depend on it not only for communication, but for document sharing and delivery between clients and other professionals.  It has not seemed to impact our perception or use of e-mail, but I would say it has changed our utilization.”
• “Predominantly Shareholders are affected.  These are also primarily the people we protect.  Spam hasn't impacted utilization.  Perception is that "Spam is hideous."
• “Spam is viewed as a very frustrating, time and space wasting intrusion to the workday.”
• “Spam is a huge nuisance and it has made us more aware of verbiage we use in the subject field.”
•  “We were getting inundated every day with spam; it was extremely disruptive due to the amount and content.”
• “It's a pain to receive so much spam, particularly now that we're inundated with virus spams.”
• “From my own personal experience, I don't even want to open my e-mail anymore.”
• “Spam has made a valuable communication tool very inefficient.”
• “It causes nervousness and paranoia.  There are some inappropriate graphics that causes everyone to be really offended. “
• “The spam has wasted our time, the pornography has disgusted all of us, and the virus-attached spam has caused damage, wasted time and effort.”
• “It's made us more aware of the fact that through Internet e-mails an invaluable communication tool, it is prone to misuse by spammers and virus writers.  We now question any e-mail attachments we receive as well as reply addresses as to their legitimacy.”

Another obvious finding of the survey was that those firms that had implemented a spam filtering application found that anti-spam solutions were working well:

• “It used to be a real problem both in terms of productivity and just plain nuisance.  People were hating to even open their e-mail.”
• “Before spam filter, too much time was wasted weeding through junk e-mails causing problems and frustration in communicating with clients.  Use of the exchange server spam filter has greatly improved the perception and use of e-mail by our staff.”
• “Since Postini, it (spam) has had little effect.  Before Postini, some partners had requested the elimination of e-mail.”
• “Utilization was hampered until I found a solution, because most users curiosity got them to open and read most of the content.  Time is money and they were wasting time.”
• “Elimination of spam for the user enables them to digest key e-mails more quickly and spend less time being concerned with which e-mails are spam and which are valid, yielding (in theory) more time for charge hours.”

The majority (85%) of respondents had implemented some type of spam filtering.  This falls in line with studies done by IDC and the Gartner group which estimated that by the end of 2004, 90% of entities would have some spam filtering solution in place.  Solutions can be broken down by external providers, internally managed by the IT department, or managed at the local workstation level.

The most popular solutions were internal filters that were managed on the mail server by IT personnel.  Of the 56 firms that utilized an internal filter, 10 utilized GFI Mail Essentials, and 7 used Symantec’s product.  34 respondents utilized an external service either through their Internet Service Provider (used by 8 firms) or a hosted solution with products such as Postini, Approver, FrontBridge and Syamantec being listed.  32 of the respondents stated that they used spam filtering tools at the individual workstation level with Outlook (11 users), SpamBayes (3 users), Symantec (3 users), and Groupwise (3 users) being the predominant responses. 

Almost one-third of the firms had multiples solutions in place with six firms having all three levels (external hosted, internal filtering, and individual workstation filter) in place, and 25 respondents utilizing at least two of the solutions.  In addition, 57 firms stated they had a specific person dedicated to the role of handling spam and filtering issues within their organization.  Most of those responsible were spending between one and five hours per week, with eleven firms spending more time than this.

The survey also found that spam had some indirect impacts on personnel that firms should also consider when evaluating the cost of solutions:

• “Utilization has gotten better since we have tightened security on the e-mail system.  I think we have stopped the problem for the most part before it got too out of hand.  However, we have gotten much more cautious of opening e-mail from unknown sources and try to keep everyone informed of the latest virus threats.  All we can do is inform employees and cross our fingers.”
• “People were generally frustrated with the amount of time it took to weed through junk.  More frequently than we care to admit, people were so "delete happy" that they accidentally deleted legitimate e-mails.  I think e-mail is used more now by our staff due to the fact that we have the spam blocking all set up.  I think the anti-spam software has given our users confidence in the e-mail system again.”
• “With the spam filter in place, it (spam) doesn't have an impact.  The biggest impact, however, is spoofed e-mails.  I get too many calls about e-mails that turned out to be spoofed.”
• “Most users complain about having to search through spam trying to get to legitimate emails.  This becomes a bigger problem as most of our staff travels and is accessing e-mail through slower dial-up lines.”
• “E-mail is necessary.  We must start budgeting more for spam and virus protection.  There is the concern over possible legal actions the firm if an employee is offended by these e-mails that they may receive.”

As mentioned above, email is too important of a communications tool to do without, so firms will have to deal with it.  This means implementing at least one, if not two of the solutions listed above, and realizing that spam is impacting the organization much more than email alone.

Roman H. Kepczyk, CPA, CITP is President and the Chief Technology Management Strategist for InfoTech Partners North America, Inc. a consulting firm that works exclusively with CPA firms to implement today’s state of the art best practices in tax, audit, client service and administrative production as they transition to a digital or “paperless” environment.

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