Fewer people find spam upsetting their on-line experience than those who complained a year ago, and six percent of us buy the products it promotes, according to a new survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
Sixty-seven percent of e-mail users said that spam made being on-line unpleasant or annoying, compared to 77% a year ago, based on a nationwide phone survey of 1,421 internet users.Pew found that 28% of users with a personal e-mail account were getting more spam than a year ago, while 22% said they were getting less. Twenty-one percent of users with a work e-mail account were getting more spam than the previous year, while 22% said they were getting less.But, despite 52% of internet users complaining that spam is a big problem, users don't seem to be regarding junk e-mail as such a great problem as they did before:
53% of e-mail users said that spam has made them less trusting of e-mail, compared to 62% a year ago;
22% of e-mail users say that spam has reduced their overall use of e-mail, compared to 29% a year ago; and
67% of e-mail users say spam has made being on-line unpleasant or annoying, compared to 77% a year ago.
"Maybe people are getting used to spam, or becoming resigned to it, just like air pollution and crowded roads," suggested Deborah Fallows, Senior Research Fellow at the Pew Internet Project and author of the report.One reason for the growing tolerance, according to the report, could be the finding that people are getting less porn spam. While 63% of e-mail users said they have received porn spam (as compared to 71% last year), 29% of those e-mail users said they are now getting less porn spam, compared to 16% who said they are getting more.And in a first-time measure of "phishing," or unsolicited e-mail requesting personal financial information, the survey also found that 35% of users had received such e-mail, while 2% had provided the information requested.Six percent of users admitted buying a product offered in a junk e-mail – a figure that has remained steady for the past few years.This reflects a finding by the survey that e-mail users have not really learned how to help themselves fight spam.E-mail users are, according to the report, less likely to exhibit good spam avoidance behaviour than they were eighteen months ago: in June 2003 69% of users would avoid posting e-mail addresses on web sites, but now only 64% take this precaution.But more users are setting up unusual e-mail addresses, such as "joe810bgs", which are more difficult for random name generating software to guess. In June 2003, 14% of users had such addresses. Now 19% of users have unusual e-mail addresses.The survey also found that e-mail users are changing their approach to e-mail sent by political or advocacy groups: in June 2003, 74% of e-mailers considered such e-mail to be spam, but by January 2005, that number had dropped significantly to 66%.
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