Slashdot Mirror
MSNBC: Offices Remain Spam Free Zones
Makarand writes "Thanks to a good job done by the tech staff and filtering software, office
workers in the US are not bothered by spam mail and the value of email
communications has not eroded. A survey conducted by Pew Internet & American
Life Project, whose findings are reported in this article by MSNBC.com, found that spam is certainly a problem for personal email accounts but not
for company provided email accounts. This is contrary to the
perception that American workers are wasting too much time battling spam." YMMV.
I think that home users don't have the resources, know-how, or time to work out an effective anti-spam system.
I can't even find a good IMAP spam filter!
Random is the New Order.
I get very little spam through my office e-mail. I don't know whether our admins use spam filters, but I have always attributed the low spam rate to the way I use the e-mail address. I use it mostly for internal e-mail, and I seldom give it to anybody outside the company. It doesn't show up in postings to Usenet (in a Reply-to field, for example), I don't use it to register at sites like nytimes.com, and I don't give it to people I don't know. That's not because I intentionally keep it a big secret, it's just a side effect of the way I work - I don't have much reason to give out my e-mail address. I believe that my lack of spam at the office can be credited to limited exposure.
Contrariwise, I wouldn't be surprised if there are people who get tons of e-mail at the office.
--Jim
Now let's see a study to show how much effort IT departments are putting in around the country (or world) to eliminate SPAM in the office place.
I work for a major computer manufacturer (I'll give you a hint, we are again number one in personal PC sales), and I never see spam at work.
But how much money does my company pay a year for me to not see spam?
just not for work email addresses. C'mon, who hasn't checked their private email account from work?
the spam I receive at work from outside the company or the emails from within. First, if it's spam I can usually tell from the subject line. Easy to delete. The emails from within require me to at least read it. And once people learned that they can use nice, pretty and extremely huge, clip art I've found that bringing up that important email to "everyone" is a real time waster.
In addition, far too many people where I work will email a subject to death. Coupled with a large CC: to population along with the "reply to all button" some subjects just won't die the undignified death they deserve. And, you have to read every one because of the odd one that may contain useful information.
I swear, what once took a 1 minute phone call to resolve now results in 20-30 emails back and forth. The only good thing I see is the CYA factor. I've saved my butt a couple of times being able to forward a message that I sent long ago, that apparently was never read. Why wasn't it read? Must have been deleted with along with the spam!
Seriously though, I spend far too much time wading through needless email at work than I do spam.
This is sort of off-topic, but I'd like to suggest why it is that home users get more spam than corporate users: they don't care. I'm using Yahoo. I simply delete spam. It's not hard. It takes up about five seconds of my day. There is no chance of not receiving something due to filtering. In a corporate enviornment, however, it is different. They pay for the servers, they pay for the [small amount of] productivity lost. At home, nobody cares. Sure, if you were getting 20 spams a day you would care, but most of us are not receive that volume of spam.
Does hotmail sell lists?"
I wouldn't put it past them.
"Or are there people and bots that just put together random strings of possible user names?"
For sure. There are enough usernames on hotmail to make it worthwhile.
"Does hotmail try to filter these"
Unlikely. This spam makes you more likely to either leave or pay for a bigger inbox so your messages are not auto-deleted to make room for more spam. Either way, MSFT makes money.
Just because end users don't see the spam doesn't mean there isn't a cost. How much time is spent creating software to combat spam? How many hours do admins spend dealing with spam before it even reaches users? How much time do users have to spend circumventing anti-spam filters to send/receive legitimate email?
These are just a few of the obvious costs related to keeping spam out of user mailboxes. It would probably boggle the mind to know the actual cost of keeping spam out of Suzy or Sammy Secretary's mailbox.
and I'll tell you why. The only reason businesses don't get as much spam compared to home users is because of one difference. The average home user doesn't have an IT department at their disposal to help fight spam. At the company I'm at we still get tons of spam for the same reason home users do. Too many people treating their work account like their home account and signing up for lists and things they shouldn't be. Spam has gotten so bad that we're considering implimenting the silver bullet of spam filtering, TMDA. The only problem is that this is very difficult to impliment and it goes purely on a whitelist only basis. Spam is everywhere and anyone who says differently is either downplaying the problem, or living in a bubble.
At least in my office environment, where we've got new Pentium 4s running Windows 95 unpatched (it's an old-school custom-job database/workflow "solution" tying us down).
We get our share of "You've been accepted!" but more common by far is "Japanese lass' sexy pictures" and "A very powful tool" - you know the drill. Our IT people's idea of security is forbidding accessing personal email accounts on the Web.
I'd trade virus emails (which crash Outlook even when you're running VirusScan or similar) for spam any day.
Where I work, we get affected by each Outlook addressbook-reading virus as they come through, even though Outlook is banned on the internal network, with threats of firing employees who use it.
...
Somehow, people don't seem to get the message.
While these occurrences are not common, they generate a huge amount of email.
They also generate a large number of clueless replies from people, asking to be taken off internal mailing lists that have been spammed, or back to the person whose addressbook has been compromised asking them to stop sending messages!
It all comes back to education in my opinion
Filtering isn't effective if it also blocks legitimate mail, and from anecdotal evidence it seems to do that excessively.
All my friends who work in places that have spam filtering implemented complain incessantly of emails not received, often times important emails on which their work depends.
And I wonder how much non-spam email is going down the memory hole? For instance, take the case of a company that lost significant mail from foreign customers in a classic "Risks Digest" blunder: offensive words in English may be perfectly innocuous in other languages...
Yeah yeah, blah blah blah...
Get real man. Show me how many of the spam whiners are paying per byte. Show me how the cost of their email account or internet service would be less because of spam.
Yeah, if anything makes you move, it's got to be a group of angry, prude feminists who've come to hang the evil sysadmin for letting the degrading stuff pass the network and in their mailbox... blaming you personally as if you wrote the emails, made the porn, and generally have a pact with the devil. That's the stuff nightmares are made off...
Some people don't seem to get the randomness of spam, they think that somebody is sending it to them personally, set out to offend them - and only them; they never seem to understand that it's their stupid chainmails, greeting cards and forums that get them into the mess anyway.
Funny enough, it's usually the people who send the most chainmails or gossip, have the least relevant emails with unnecessary cc's, or fill up the mailqueue with bigass attachments, that complain most about spam.
That's when you know it's time to add 'cute kittens' to your spam filter.
He wasn't actually questioning the acronym, just that his mileage may vay. To which he replies: "My Mileage (Fucking) Varies!"
Sorry, but *that* was marked up as 'Interesting'?
Personally, I loathe advertising. Spam is just another form of that. Filtering out all that trash bothers me a *lot*.
And yes, it is expensive. My parents live in South Africa, downloading their email through a little 56K modem (which rarely hits over 9600, thanks to the lousy ISP). They pay per KB and per minute. Think they don't mind "just pressing delete"?
I'm lucky - I sit in Germany with an unlimited DSL line - and it *still* bothers me. Spam is on the verge of making my accounts unusable.
Bah. You sound a little like that idiot I read who called himself "all-american free-speech spammer".
Ciao,
Klaus
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/