Slashdot Mirror
People are More Accepting of Spam
twitter writes "Many news organizations are reflecting the opinion of Pew Internet and American Life Project staffer Deborah Fallows that '...email users say they are receiving slightly more spam in their inboxes than before, but they are minding it less.' I think that's an odd conclusion to draw. You would expect the number of people using email less because of spam to decrease to zero quickly when 25% of the population say they avoid email! To their credit, they point out that CAN-SPAM has done nothing to help." The Reuters blurb about this study has a syopsis of their findings.
Spam has been around long enough that the latest demographic group to join the Net have always known spam. To them, it is a natural thing.
Perhaps part of the reason is that many e-mail clients have better filtering mechanisms in them now than in previous years. With clients like Apple's Mail and Thunderbird, spam filtering can get quite accurate. I get as much spam as ever (if not more), but I rarely see any of it. The filters appear to do their job quite nicely.
We may not be getting less spam, but the tools to help deal with it have been improving, and are being made available to more and more e-mail users.
Yaz.
I don't find this very strange. People adapt, and their expectations change.
Most people learn to spot spam at a glance, so even though total amount may have increased even those without spamfilters probably use less and less time deleting it. That doesn't mean we accept it more though, it just mean we aren't as bothered by it as we used to.
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
And so the problem dissolves.
Personally, I get 150 Spam per day. 1 or 2 of them appear in my inbox and are quickly deleted. SPAM isn't much of an issue for me.
Checking your email via web or pop now takes seconds not minutes for your email to download (as it used to for dialup).
So people are less annoyed (than they used to be) about waiting for 50 messages to download and most of them being spam.
Filtering has got a lot better too, I have not recieved a single spam with my gmail account.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything" -- Josef Stalin
It's pretty messed up. I remember the days when everyone was worried about this whole "online purchasing" thing. Everyone thought that it was just some sham to take peoples credit card numbers. Now people will buy products from companies that advertise in a sketchy manner and don't even spell things correctly? It's definitely a bit frightening.
It could just be that more and more people have resigned themselves to the fact that spam is here to stay. Whether you could (or should) attribute that to the spam having diminished impact on these people is questionable.
I get so much spam nowadays (which is thankfully filtered by SpamAssassin) that I no longer have time to sift through my spam folders looking for potential false positives, so using this articles logic you could argue I was more "accepting" of it, when really I have just resigned myself to forever receiving spam.
They are right about one thing though - CAN-SPAM has proven to be virtually useless.
For instance some people at my workplace have terrible difficulty finding out which emails require immediate attention and which are garbage (not even spam).
They are slow in recognizing spam, and some get so overwhelmed with the amount of crap in their inboxes (which for some users only means 20 or 30% of their emails are spam) that they want to abandon email all together.
Of course somebody could put a better filter in place on the server and/or clients, but some people just can't handle email much yet. (it's the same people who you see opening windows explorer and stare at the screen for 2 minutes trying to figure out where their files are again, or those who double click links on internet pages because to open things you need to double click, right?)
Sample this!
Given that the survey was carried out by telephone, doesn't it stand to reason that someone who accepts an unsolicited call from a canvasser/surveyor/telemarketer would also be less inclined to be bothered by spam?
The mail is still hitting your providers server, increasing costs for them and prices for you; you're paying for the spammers infrastructure! Filtering is no magic bullet, you should be asking why people are getting away with depositing turds in your mailbox to begin with. Be angry, very angry.
People are getting numb to spam like they're numb to postal junk mail.
the last time there was an article on spam?
If not, my Dejavu-ometer need recalibrating.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Personally, I'd say I'm more "resigned to" spam, than "accepting of" spam. I'd be willing to bet a lot of people feel the same way.
Join moola.com, play games to earn money.
here is a link for ASSP, if you like it give them money. http://assp.sourceforge.net/
If anything, you just illustrate why spam is a problem.
/. kind of off-topic posts just to show that you know some obscure detail better than the poster. The "woo, I'm better than you because I know better about some irrelevant detail" or "you suck, because you misspelled a word" posts. Taking that kind of thing to email was actually considered the proper thing to do. (Mind you, I'm not saying that everyone stuck to doing the proper thing.)
Let me tell you a story. Back before SPAM, giving your email address to people was _not_ considered some "unwise use" of it. It was the _whole_ idea of email.
E.g., I put my email address in all my newsgroup posts. _Not_ because of being "SOOO important", but because some conversations that ensued were really just between two people. No point spamming the whole newsgroup with stuff that really didn't concern everyone else on that newsgroup.
Especially since it would be often off-topic for that newsgroup anyway. E.g., if I made the ISO standard dumb comparison to a car in a hardware newsgroup, I would fully expect that anyone going on a non-hardware-related car tangent (e.g., "actually, the <car model> doesn't have a diesel option") would do so in email.
If anything "e-penis" would have been the exact opposite: the
Or, yes, when I wrote a game walkthrough, I did put both my email addresses in it. Not out of a sense of being "SOOO important", but simply because I _didn't_ consider it to be the alpha and omega of gaming walkthroughs. I figured that there _is_ plenty of stuff I had ommited, so email seemed like a good way to, you know, _communicate_ about that. Let people send me corrections, or ask additional questions.
It may no longer seem that obvious any more, but some of us actually used email to _communicate_ with people. Even strangers. That was the whole idea, in fact. (Family members already knew my telephone number, after all.)
Email was _not_ supposed to be some top secret, jealously kept secret even from idiot acquaintances who might leak it when they get virused. It was, in fact, _supposed_ to be usable for even perfect strangers to contact you, should they need to do that.
And that we've got at the point where all that got turned right on its head, well, you've just illustrated the damage that spam did. What should have been a valuable communication resource, got turned into something top secret and where a message from a stranger would more likely be deleted than read.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I get spam now that have about 2-3 paragraphs of text that are mostly plagurized poetry, then all of the words that trigger spam filters are in the graphics included in the HTML email.
Yeah, where are those copyright zealots when we actually could use them? Have the rights users sue them for using works of art in mischievous activities.
People make out spam to be a bigger problem than it is. Sure it can be quite serious from an admin perspective if your basically getting DoS'd but from an inbox perspective its really not that big of a deal unless for some reason your poor address has been hit with hundreds of spams a day. Most filters are pretty good, web-based email like gmail is absolutely excellent and there _are_ ways to solve the problem, theres no need for one 'final solution' but things like challenge-response servers and micro-payment providers (the micro-payment should go to the recipient) will probably become popular and the web as a whole will decide which is the best solution. Obviously education is key here as well - people need to understand the basic fact: if anyone you don't actually know personally calls you up or emails you, theres no way of telling who they are, if they are legit or not, and where your credit card number will end up if you're retarded enough to give it to them, if anyone has been educated and yet still responds to spam and looses all their money i have no sympathy for them, in fact i think of them as scum, almost as bad as the spammer because they are the only reason spam/telemarketing is a viable business.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
people accept the state, because they do not know about any alternatives
Alternatives to spam? Surely you're not claiming you have an alternative to spam which involves still having an email account.
What we have to do is to educate people, teach them not to click "yes" to everything they see
Agreed.
and to filter as much spam as possible.
Filter it? Why do we have to teach people to filter spam? What do you care if I filter spam or not? Why does it make me stupid to tolerate the spam I receive?
There are alternatives to spam, but they don't involve email. The way email is designed makes spam inevitable. The alternatives are instant messaging, phone calls, faxes, and sometimes even good old snail mail.
When spammers (and phisers) stop getting money, maybe they will stop.
Spam will never completely stop. Not as long as email remains a free, global, unauthenticated medium, anyway. There are a lot of idiots in the world, not just on the receiving end of spam but also on the sending side. Hopefully the studies that say that most spam comes from a small number of spammers is true, but cutting an exponentially growing phenomenon by a factor of even 10 isn't going to accomplish very much.
Why didn't you just slap her silly?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I know that the cards you get from those places are cheap-looking, but I'd love to know where you're getting 250 cards for $7 from a regular business. If I recall correctly, last time I checked at the UPS store, they wanted $25-30 for 50 cards. Not saying that buying from the cheapo site is a good idea, just pointing that out.
http://angel.merseine.nu - Stuff for the poet, diva, geek, romantic and angel in all of us.
Yes this is exactly the problem I encounter as well. I deal with many clients using free e-mail services and about five percent of the time, I am _simply unable_ to communicate with them.
They purchase a product from me then I e-mail them the software in return; Those people that never receive my delivery will start firing off e-mails, which I do receive quite perfectly, upset that I seem to be swindling them. I am completely unable to respond in any manner!
Sometimes I can play around with the return receipt and priority settings. I don't know if that helps the mail get through, or just helps it get noticed, but sometimes that helps. For those especially stubborn instances, I've had to resort to signing up for an account at whatever freemail site they're using to communicate a response. As a result I now have e-mail accounts at all of the major sites: hotmail, yahoo, gmail, and even a few of the more esoteric ones.
I use filtering as much as everyone else I know, but I guess I still find it insulting that I should have to. That I'm able to filter email on my end doesn't change:
the fact that some of it still gets through to annoy me and waste my time.
the fact that I'm likely to occasionally miss important emails because filters occasionally get false positives.
the fact that dealing with spam is still using resources on my connection and ultimately costing me money for traffic charges.
the fact that the vast clogginess of spam creates major problems for my ISP upstream, causing my monthly Internet bill to be substantially higher than it might be otherwise.
the fact that a small portion of morons out there are making millions of dollars off my inconvenience.
Filters are getting better, but as long as it's still possible for spammers to keep fighting them, and as long as they keep diverting attention from the realisation that we wouldn't need an imperfect filter solution if we didn't have a spammer problem, I'm not personally going to be happy about how things are going.
You are right. Spam is not comparable to rape or murder. But that doesn't mean 9 years for a spammer is too long. It means rapists and murderers get sentences far below what they should get.
Linux is not Windows