A client recently complained that each back office staff member spent 10 minutes a day eliminating spam from their mailboxes. Not only is this 10 minutes of unproductive work time, it has a knock on effect by putting office staff in a thoroughly grumpy negative mood. Every day.

Google possesses the world’s best spam blocking software, so even if you don’t use GMail it’s worth running their mail services in the background if you’re an SME and have no time or patience to deal with spam. Best of all, it’s free.

As soon as we installed the service, our client phoned within hours congratulating us on a miraculous reduction in spam.

Follow this great Google’s Knol guide written by Google Apps employee Steve and it’ll all run very smoothly. You’ll have to fiddle with DNS MX records and the like but the effort is well worth it. As soon as we installed the service, our client phoned within hours about the miraculous reduction in spam. That’s what I call an immediate ITC productivity gain.