Spam is an issue facing any business today. According to a study conducted late last year by Nucleus Research Inc., spam management costs U.S. businesses more than $71 billion annually in lost productivity — $712 per employee. It is estimated today that roughly 65% of all email is spam. At AutoRevo alone, we receive thousands of spam messages each day.

Spam not only clogs up our inboxes with unwanted advertisements, it also is used to launch phishing attacks, Trojan horses and transmit computer viruses. Spammers are sophisticated and often well funded. Spammers have a strong monetary interest in keeping your inbox flooded with their junk mail, so winning the war against spam is a tough fight indeed.

At AutoRevo, we’ve recently made substantial investments in both hardware and software to combat spam. The results so far show that we’ve made significant inroads in reducing the amount of spam our dealers are seeing. 

From the graph below, you can see that from April 25’th to May 1’st we were able to reduce the total number of spam from over 13,000 messages a day to around 1,000. That’s over a 90% reduction! And we aren’t finished yet. Our spam filtering system gets “smarter” each day and adapts to spammer’s techniques so we expect these numbers to drop even lower.

Beyond controlling spam, we are also reducing the number of viruses that enter our dealer’s mailboxes. The graph below shows that since improving our virus detection system on April 25’th, we have effectively stopped viruses from finding their way to our dealers.

There is no doubt that spammers will continue to find new ways of delivering their junk mail and viruses, but we’re committed to protecting our dealers and we will continue to invest time and money into this worthwhile effort.