Spam is not just for dinner any more

A University of Maryland study finds that junk e-mail costs U.S. businesses almost $22 billion a year.  The average employee gets 18 spam messages a day and spends an average of 2.8 minutes reading and deleting them.  At average U.S. wage rates, that adds up to $21.6 billion of real work employees would otherwise be doing, says the study.  [Update: The assumptions in the study, though, seem to have some serious flaws.]

A striking finding of the study, however, is that four percent of recipients have actually bought something advertised through a spam message within the past year-- which suggests that the inundation will continue.