Spam costing companies $22 billion a year

CNN.com has an AP story on the costs to business of deleting spam.

"Time wasted deleting junk e-mail costs American businesses nearly $22 billion a year, according to a new study from the University of Maryland. A telephone-based survey of adults who use the Internet found that more than three-quarters receive spam daily. The average spam messages per day is 18.5 and the average time spent per day deleting them is 2.8 minutes."

There is no discussion of the cost of responding to telephone-based surveys, though.