Kaspersky finds employees lose around two business days sorting out spam emails

Woburn, MA – May 31, 2022 — According to Kaspersky analysis, employees who receive 30-60 external emails per day could be wasting 11 hours every year sorting through and identifying spam messages. For employees receiving between 60-100 emails a day, this number rises to 18 hours per year, which is more than two business days. These are the findings from Kaspersky’s analysis of the amount of spam bombarding corporate mailboxes and how it could affect the productivity of employees[1].

Kaspersky researchers uncovered the amount of spam received per employee and, using a third-party study,[2] approximated the number of hours office workers could be spending on reading or just looking through these messages. Employees were split into three groups according to the number of emails they received daily from outside their organization.

According to the calculations, those getting sent up to 30 emails per day also receive around 30 spam samples a week, and waste in total around five hours every year sorting them out. Workers receiving 30-60 emails each day spend 11 hours per year doing the same, which is more than one business day. And those receiving up to 100 emails daily can spend 18 hours, more than two business days a year. For mailboxes with more than 100 incoming messages per day, the number of hours needed to sort out spam emails equates to 80 per year.

“Five hours across a whole year may not sound critical for one employee, but when scaled to an organization with hundreds of employees, this may turn into a sizable amount of person-hours,” comments Andrey Kovtun, email threats protection group manager at Kaspersky. “The number may look greater in businesses focused on providing services where employees communicate more actively with external parties. Employees can also waste time getting back to work after reading and deleting spam, as email is a huge distractor. These negative effects of spam may not be so obvious, but organizations should be aware of them and protect their employees with dedicated anti-spam and anti-phishing tools.”

To keep employees’ productivity high and avoid the negative consequences of spam and email threats, Kaspersky recommends organizations take the following steps:

• Switch on the anti-spam or junk email function in your mail service if there is no dedicated solution as an add-on. This feature should decrease the spam flow.
• Educate employees to recognize spam and especially phishing emails by looking at such signs as the sender's address, executable files or files with macros in attachments and calls to action. This should decrease the chance of an attack and help employees get rid of unwanted messages quicker.
• Implement dedicated protection for mail servers, such as Kaspersky Security for Mail Server with a solid set of anti-phishing, anti-spam, and malware detection technologies. For cloud services, such as Microsoft 365, there is a dedicated Kaspersky Security for Microsoft Office 365 solution.

About Kaspersky

Kaspersky is a global cybersecurity company founded in 1997. Kaspersky’s deep threat intelligence and security expertise is constantly transforming into innovative security solutions and services to protect businesses, critical infrastructure, governments and consumers around the globe. The company’s comprehensive security portfolio includes leading endpoint protection and a number of specialized security solutions and services to fight sophisticated and evolving digital threats. Over 400 million users are protected by Kaspersky technologies and we help 240,000 corporate clients protect what matters most to them. Learn more at usa.kaspersky.com.

Media Contact:

Cassandra Faro

Cassandra.Faro@Kaspersky.com

781-503-1812