Google unveiled a nifty little tool to help you calculate, how much is spam costing to your company. The announcement is part of a marketing campaign for Google Message Security, the online spam-filtering service based on the Postini technology Google acquired last year.

To figure out the cost of spam, you enter things like the number of workers at your company, how much you pay them and how much spam they have to deal with, and presto: Google figures out how many days (and dollars) in lost productivity this represents.

Of course, it also tells you how long it would take for Google's service to pay for itself at your shop. For companies doing their spam-fighting in-house, there's also a "total cost of ownership" calculator to show how inexpensive Google thinks its service really is.

While Google may be helping people figure out how much spam costs, the company itself could do a thing or two to reduce spam, said Richard Cox, CIO of the Spamhaus antispam group. He would like to see Google do more to block spammers from using the Gmail service and to start including the IP addresses of Gmail senders in its message headers.


Source: Computer World