Ironically, efforts to block spam sometimes cost businesses revenue by preventing employees from seeing mail from legitimate contacts, including customers. Anti-spam experts call these missed or lost emails of the wanted variety "false positives."

Employees may still miss the wanted mail if a business does not use any anti-spam for fear of missing wanted mail. Humans can also mistakenly delete or visually skip over a wanted mail that is mixed in with lots of unwanted email.

Businesses who sell a high volume of a low ticket price item may not feel the sting of losing a potential customer as much as those for whom even one lost email could mean giving up a sale worth tens of thousands of dollars or more. The Internet makes it so easy to find competitors - customers may move on to the next guy without trying to make phone contact if they don't get a response to email.

Perhaps the best-known business cost of email spam is time wasted by employees wading through their inbox to delete the bad and find the good. In some cases, employees will actually read the spam and may get sidetracked from their job to read websites of special offer emails or worse.

In some cases, employees get a signal each time new mail arrives. When that new mail is spam, many clicks are necessary to see what the new mail was and delete it. The employee may be distracted from their current task repeatedly throughout the day, causing a drag on productivity.

Less discussed is the change in emotional state or morale that may occur to some people when they are exposed to degrading, intrusive or threatening language or images in some types of email spam.

The Mail Cruncher service my company created is designed to address these issues:

 - Most businesses choose not to reject mail, ensuring that all wanted business mail gets seen. While accepting mail isn't usually what ISPs want to do - it accepting and tagging does seem to be in the best interests of the businesses the ISP serves.

 - Suspect mail from "slippery senders" is delivered as a once-a-day list about 3:45 pm. Employee time spent dealing with spam is compressed to two minutes or less per day.

 - "Borking" of spam subjects and content is available as an option. Borking transforms words into less-damaging, more humorous phrasing ala the Swedish Chef accent from Sesame Street. Anecdotally, users report that this helps takes the shock effect away from authors of offensive spam.

 - Color coding, sorting and grouping help to bring mail most likely to be wanted to the top of the Mail Cruncher list. The sender's from address as well as "name" are displayed to make it eaiser and faster to scan the list quickly, then a single click deletes all unwanted mail.

 - Text of emails can be safely viewed in Mail Cruncher without executing any viruses or revealing to spammers that your address is a good one. Spammers can tell you opened their email the moment you view the mail using Outlook or other unprotected email software, by a trick of hidden images or images you see which are included in HTML mail.

See http://MailCruncher.com/ for a 60 day risk-free trial.