According to a recent study, people have found that it just isn’t worth their time to resist spam. According to the Washington Post, a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project (sounds like the name of an online church and/or anti-abortion group, rather than a Spam watchdog, doesn’t it?) has found that a sample of 1,400 internet users are tolerating spam now.
“Compared to a year ago, fewer e-mail users now say that spam is undermining their trust in e-mail, eroding their e-mail use or making life online unpleasant or annoying.”
“It’s one of the annoyances in life that you eventually resign yourself to,” Pew Internet chief Lee Rainie told [Post reporter Robert MacMillan] in an interview this morning.
If one were to compile a list of the ten worst things in America, “Spam” could hit the list twice.
I have two primary e-mail accounts, and one of them gets basically nothing but spam and automatically sent messages from groups or vendors with whom I deal. (I get, for instance, Fox News Alerts, e-mail travel itineraries, online credit card statements, etc., at that address.) The spam doesn’t bother me at all. I know that I’ll get a bunch of it, and I just delete it (it’s pretty easy to recognize, the subject line is usually something like “free Viagra for you” or something silly and obvious). I’ve never gone out searching for a “spam filter” or anything else that companies like Netzero and AOL seem to believe has great value to consumers.
So is spam gradually fading into the equivalent of background muzak? After all, we humans are talented at filtering out chronic distractions. We did it with the daily rush hour, the annoyance of overhearing strangers’ cell phone conversations, the threat of nuclear annihilation and those people who order half-caf, semi-skim, double-shot espresso drinks in front of us at the coffee shop. Now, the Pew survey says, we’re doing it with spam.
There could be another explanation for the Pew findings. As more people use the Internet to shop, pay bills and perform other critical aspects of daily life, they begin to worry about a far more dangerous threat — an increase in online crime. The San Jose Mercury News covered this angle in its report this morning: “People may also be more worried about newer, more malicious Internet threats such as ‘phishing’ scams, in which e-mail messages purport to be from a legitimate company such as a bank asking the user for personal information. The Pew survey found that 35 percent of users said they have received phishing messages, with about 2 percent providing information to the scam artists.
Spam is a comical but minor annoyance, like station identification on the radio or the weekly test of the emergency broadcast system on television. Don’t fight the spam… embrace its humorous nature and ignore it.
Nathan Novak at 9:49 am
Yes I agree, i don’t use a spam filter either and I have 5 primary email accounts that are checked every 30 seconds of every day. I attempt to use yahoo and msn for spam accounts, but the spammers still find you. No big deal, just delete them and be done with it. It takes a lot more time to find, configure and then have trust in a spam filter. I personally would rather sort through the emails myself that take the chance of a spam filter keeping me from receiving a customers email.
Comment by Eric VanLandingham — April 11, 2005 @ 10:40 am
I have never ever had a spam problem. Like the people in the article interviewed, I too have about 5 email accounts one of which I call my “spam account” I go check it about once a month or so and see if there is anything worth looking at , then I purge. This system has worked for me for about 5 years.
Comment by Hassan — April 11, 2005 @ 10:52 am
if we dont fight spam then in a few years from now your mailbox will be 99% spam which might be amusing for you but not to a business user
Comment by tim — April 11, 2005 @ 10:53 am
Every stick has two ends and at this point most of us are at a loss, whether we fight spam or not.
Comment by Walt — April 11, 2005 @ 11:00 am
Response: Fair enough, Tim. Business users generally do need to protect against spam and every business for which I’ve worked has had rock solid defense against the spammers. But as for your assertion that if “we” don’t fight spam then “a few years from now your mailbox will be 99% spam,” that’s just ridiculous. There’s no public-wide necessity in fighting spam to keep it from getting to people who do use effective filters. If I let the spam flow, that’s not going to keep you from shutting down the spam on your end. We’re not fighting cholera here.
I did hear a rumor last week, however, that Karl Rove actually started the spam movement so he could start spam filter businesses, with all the profits going straight to the Republican National Committee. More on this as we get it…
Comment by Nathan J. Novak — April 11, 2005 @ 11:01 am
What hogwash! “Tolerating” spam is NOT the same as eating it, relishing it, or wanting it. It means that people have come to accept it as a fact of life, like dying. Does the fact that dying is going to happen to all of us make us want to run out and get blown away? NO. Do I want spam? NO.
Why should I have to give up my fav email address just because some douchebag wants to sell me viagra or get me to buy into their christian mortgage scam? I average 600-700 spams a day on ONE email address, and I worry that something important will get lost in the mess.
Spam sucks. CAN-SPAM sucks even more.
Comment by Alphaman — April 11, 2005 @ 11:02 am
I disagree with your article concerning SPAM. I find it offensive, invasive, and a waste of my time to deal with it. It seems to me that it would be an easy matter to implement an applet which simply bounces all messages back to the sender and if it doesn’t verify, it gets dumped. 99% of all SPAM, including that which is generated offshore would CEASE in a very short time.
Comment by TD Pittsford — April 11, 2005 @ 11:04 am
Could it be that advertising corporations have some sway over how Pew trust funds are used? Could it be that a “study release” that makes it look like spam is just hunky-dory bodes well for advertisers looking to expand markets while TV ad revenues shrivel? I don’t know but it makes me a bit ill to see anybody say spam is OK in any way. F**K SPAM!
I hear angry complaints about spam almost daily form my coworkers. If you ask anybody I know if they hate spam as much as they ever did, everyone of them would say yes.
Comment by Bobb Dobbs — April 11, 2005 @ 11:14 am
I have three email accounts and I don’t have spam in any of them. You only need to be careful and don’t publish your address on the Internet or if you do so, just modify it to fool the spam spiders. It’s easy.
Comment by Pedro — April 11, 2005 @ 11:16 am
Well, I wouldn’t be so confident that these people are getting along fine without spam protection. For instance I use gmail and the spam filter works great and if I wasn’t so technically sophisticated I might think I wasn’t using any spam blocking software when as a matter of fact most of my email goes through two spam filtering systems (my main email account system and then forwarded through gmail).
In short what this article might really be showing is that most ISPs low level non-interactice anti-spam provisions are working and people just don’t know about them since they don’t advertise like AOL.
Comment by logicnazi — April 11, 2005 @ 11:18 am
Well.
I’ve learned to deal with SPAM too for both business and personnal use. But I found out that doing it manually made me waste my time (manually deleting SPAM or configuring filters takes a lot of time). And I don’t like the idea of downloading to my computer infected e-mails. I realized that a SPAM filter was a good investement for me to do. I let my tool connect to anti-SPAM databases and with very few clicks I download all my e-mail headers (not their content) from 5 different e-mail accounts into a single interface, most of which get automatically erased by anti-spam algorithms and anti-spam database detection, the remainer are just flagged by me and are reported to feed the anti-SPAM databases.
I don’t want to do any advertisement here, I just want to share my experience, and I have to say that the software I use here (MailWasher) has been a great relief. I encourage everyone to have a similar tool. For me it was vital (this tool statistics show that I know have 83% of SPAM out of 100 or so e-mails per day). It would be impossible for me to filter this manually.
Even if you have a very special private e-mail account and try not to use it for commercial purposes you cannot prevent friends of yours from adding this “special” e-mail address into e-mail forwards, so your protected address just ends like the others in the hands of spammers. No discipline here can break this rule.
I believe the onnly way to deal with SPAM is to use anti-SPAM software.. I think this is the best way to do it.
Comment by D. Tercero — April 11, 2005 @ 11:32 am
“Tolerating” spam is easy to do… if you don’t receive 3000+ spam messages a day, like we do on our business account. We have a “garbage collection” account that receives any e-mail that is sent to our domain, but with an invalid address. This is handy if a client misspells one of our e-mail addresses, but it gets absolutely clogged with spam to the point where it’s no longer useful. I used to have to check it every day (back when it was 100 a day or so), but as the daily intake gradually increased month to month, I handed the task off to our sales assistant. Now she’s told me she regularly gets over 1000 a day, and has sometimes gotten 3000 in one 24-hour period. It can take her well over an hour just to download it all.
We used to have spam filtering software, but it would sometimes delete some of the legitimate e-mails sent to us by our clients, so we were ordered by the powers that be to remove it.
Comment by Joe — April 11, 2005 @ 11:46 am