Pew spews spam stats, fewer people bothered

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 24 May 2007 23:07

IT Industry - Strategy

The amount of spam we receive is going up, but fewer people seem bothered by spam. Do we now just accept spam as just another fact of life?

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has issued their latest report, this time on spam, and as always, free of charge. But while Pew finds more Americans receiving more spam than ever before, the stats show that people are so used to spam they’re not quite as bothered about it anymore.

This has led to suggestions that people have given up and are just accepting spam as a fact of life, but reasonably good anti-spam filters in most popular email programs deal with the majority of spam, create only a few false positives which can be easily whilelisted to allow for future delivery of mail from the legitimate sender.

Some spam always seems to leak through into the mail inbox as the spammers work on ways to defeat anti-spam systems. According to Pew, 71% of email users “use filters offered by their email provider or employer to block spam. Users also report lessexposure to pornographic spam, which to many people is the most offensive type of unsolicited email”.

Pew’s report also noted that: “spam has not become a significant deterrent to the use of email, as some observers speculated it might when unsolicited email first began flooding users inboxes several years ago. But it continues to degrade the integrity of email. Some 55% of email users say they have lost trust in email because of spam”.

The report notes that 37% of email users said they have received more spam than two years ago, compared with 28% who said the same thing two years ago and even a smaller group of people, pegged at the 21% level of users three years ago.

Work users also said spam had increased, with a total of 29% reporting more spam than in their email inbox, up from 21% two years ago and 18% three years ago.

Yet despite the increase, email users are simply less bothered by spam as they’ve become desensitized to it, with 25% of users saying it was a big problem three and a half years ago, while today’s study shows only 18% of people who still say spam is a big problem for them.

These plenty more information, stats and findings at Pew’s complete PDF based report.