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.
The article is playing on the stereotype that all spammers live extremely well off their activities, although this may have been true up until recently, and there are still people making huge amounts of money from it - the reason phising and stuff is becoming more common is because the profits from spam are becoming lower.
You can't just pick up a mailing software, buy a list and sit back and watch the money roll in anymore, so the new kids wanting to be millionaires have to result to more devious tactics.
One of the causes of this behavior could be that there are a lot of people who started using email not too long ago.
Therefore, spam was there when they started emailing, and they don't complain about it because it is no change.
A simile here would be people who always lived near an airport tend to complain less about the airport than the people who just moved to that region. Thus, a change in the behavior of a user environment is more likely to be a cause for complaints than something that has always been there.
We do not complain about the high death toll caused by traffic anymore, do we? they did in the past!
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
I guess I now have two groups of people I don't like.
First, it was just the people who responded to spam, making it profitable to spamers.
Now I guess I really don't like people who have grown tolerent of it.
When I first got an Internet email address in 1992, it took me all of 2 unsolicted emails in my inbox before I started hating spam, and I still hate it.
The only good news out of this study is that people don't trust email. That's good. If you didn't ask for a company to send you an email, I mean, if you didn't explicitly ask them (sorry, clicking 'I agree' to an EULA that has a 'we will send you spam' statement buried deep inside does not mean you want to get it), the company that sends it to you is unethical and you shouldn't do business with it.
Period.
Spam pisses me off. It should piss other people off too.
The Internet is generally stupid
I also find that increased storage space, especially on webmail accounts, means I'm not so bothered by it. I've had spam to my gmail account (despite never giving out the email address, just using it for testing the interface), but it was all filed correctly in the spam folder.
this is probably an argument that most slashdotters will dismiss blindly, but I dare say that the quality of spam has changed as well : while we still do get a whole lot of G3T R1CH F4ST crap, there is a marginal increase in 'reasonable' spam for products that do exist and might perhaps be interesting to a small percentage of the population. A bit like dead tree spam : I skip trhough it in a glimpse, but once in a while something interesting catches my attention.
Maybe the percentage the article talks about, is just that small increase in quality ?
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
5 years ago if I sent an email to someone, I was virtually assured they got it. Now, I am forced to follow up almost *EVERY* email I get with a "Got it, thanks" or a if I dont hear from someone in a few days -- a phone call. Not a big deal, but not exactly the modern marvel of technology we were looking for?
I've heard about VOIP spam becoming the next big thing -- I really weep for the future. What am I going to follow up PHONE calls with? Certified Letters?
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
A friend of mine who gets about 500 spams a day (and has plenty of room for that on the mail server) has an interesting non-techie workaround.
/dev/null and make life easier, but the principle would still be the same.
He tells all his friends a secret nonsensical code word starting with "Z" to include as the first word of the subject line. The he sorts his webmail inbox by subject and ignores everything that doesn't start with that word.
He's not a big net user, so he doesn't need throw-away accounts or anything like that. For him, it's quite enough to be able to see what's from friends and ignore the rest.
Obviously, a more tech-savvy person could just set up a simple procmail script to send all the non-friend mails to
This isn't a universally applicable idea, but for someone who just needs personal e-mail from people he knows I think it's a pretty interesting solution.
This Like That - fun with words!