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.

Comments

Men worried as pr0n spam drops

[amigoro]

A growing number of men have been unable to go perpendicular despite Hitachi's best efforts due to the decrease in pornographic spam emails as reported by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

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Desensitized

[ishmalius]

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.

Re:Desensitized

[DarkHelmet]

It's kind of like growing up in a country without rights.

After a while, the next generation of people are accustomed to it. Because of the lack of outrage, the system stays in place.

It applies here perfectly too. Nothing will be done about spam as long as most of the people out there will put up with it, and some of the people out there even go so far as support it.

Re:Desensitized

[selderrr]

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 ?

Re:Desensitized

[tehshen]

Although I agree spam has increased in quality over time, I think there is one thing making it not quite so credible - people get loads of it.

I have received a few spams that really do look genuine, "I tried sending this to you before" sort of thing, that could fool quite a few people. However, the trouble is that I get this same spam five or six times a day. People are more likely to respond to a one-day 'offer' spam than when they're being drowned in them.

And if spammers are being paid by the number of spams sent, rather than spams replied to, this shouldn't change soon, thankfully.

Re:Desensitized

[anthony_dipierro]

Spam isn't a system, though. In fact, spam is more nearly the lack of a system.

The cost of elminating spam would be very high. If you took the legal approach, you'd have to create a global police state over every email that anyone sends. Even then you're likely not to get full cooperation, so you'd lose whole countries full of people from the internet. If you took the technical approach, then you'd lose the ability to send an email to anyone, from anywhere, without any passwords or keys, and without even necessarily telling the truth about who you are.

The third solution is a partial one - filtering. It sucks in that it allows some spam to get through and more importantly it runs the risk of having legitimate mail dropped, but it seems for most it's the most acceptable of the possible solutions.

So, if you call filtering nothing, then I'd guess that nothing will be done about spam as long as there is still e-mail.

Re:Desensitized

[frostman]

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.

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 /dev/null and make life easier, but the principle would still be the same.

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.

Typical Spammer Stereotype

[redswinglinestapler]

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.

Obviously they don't read Slashdot

[NitsujTPU]

Given the number of posters who recommended the death penalty for the guy who received 9 years for his contribution to society (spam), I'd say that the persons who participated in this study are not Slashdot readers.

Better filters?

[Yaztromo]

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.

Re:Better filters?

[Lars Arvestad]

Yeah, but if actual users are saying the get more spam, it is likely that they see the spam themselves, I would say. So I would guess that people are getting increasingly used to spam. Sad.

Personally, I have no idea about my spam rates since I filter out spam myself in Thunderbird, plus that the organizations I belong to seem to do a good job of keeping some of the spam out using SpamAssasin and other tricks.

Spam with trigger words in the pictures

[redswinglinestapler]

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. It's a smart tactic (albeit annoying). It really throws off the spam filters. Does anyone else get a lot of these? Anyway to filter them out?

They change the bogus names and email addresses, of course, but the ads clearly are coming from the same source.

'but they are minding it less.'

[hyfe]

but they are minding it less.'

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.

Re:hhhmmm...

[DenDave]

What? You wanna wait till they spam pearl harbour before you do anything about it??

one possible cause

[toQDuj]

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.

of course I mind less, 4 a reason

[l3v1]

they are receiving slightly more spam in their inboxes than before, but they are minding it less.

Of course I mind less, but I do because a good reason: the server I pop my mail from uses paid-for spam filtering (nothing revolutionary, but quite good), then my Thunderbird also squeezes them quite a bit. What I get at the end is below my getting-angry-about-it threshold. But, I have to tell that overall I get quite more spam than let's say this time last year. The reason I don't mind is that the number of spam I get after double filtering is _not_ higher than before.

Broadband

[L0k11]

Without even RTFA I'd say it has a lot to do with broadband uptake.

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.

Re:Broadband

[surferbill]

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.

Re:Broadband

[tehshen]

However gmail is completely useless at tagging phishing emails as spam.

From my experience with it, it does do this, and it does it well. It puts a big "This message may not be from who it seems to be from" message at the top of the screen, and doesn't load any images.

Then again, I've only had two eBay phishing spams, and they were both obvious.

Differing interpretation

[Overcoat]

From the Reuters article:

Fifty-three percent of adult e-mail users in the United States now say they trust e-mail less because of spam, down from 62 percent a year ago and about the same as a June 2003 Pew survey.

Note the reference to "e-mail users". Thus the decline in e-mail users who say they trust e-mail less because of spam may be the result of people getting fed up with spam and ceasing to use e-mail.

X-YahooFilteredBulk

[redswinglinestapler]

I noticed that a lot of spam coming through my Yahoo account had been tagged with the header "X-YahooFilteredBulk". I added this to my Exim system filter and I've gone from 20+ spams a day in my inbox to 2 in a week. Thank you Yahoo!

Unfortunately, a lot anti-spam measures (including Exim 3's system filters) only take place after a message has been accepted for delivery. For me, this results in a lot of bounce messages frozen in the queue as they cannot be returned (Hotmail mailbox full, etc). I've switched on features like verifying the sender and the headers, but this doesn't catch them all, and in some cases might even stop some legitimate spam (one of my mailing lists uses incorrect syntax for the "RCPT TO:").

More effective anti-spam systems need to filter before the message has been accepted. If you wait until then, it is already too late and it is on your system. No, refusing accept delivery is much effective IMHO, and forces the MTA's further up the chain to deal with it. They shouldn't have accepted it in the first place! When you get spam, return 550 (or whatever the code is) and let the SMTP client deal with it. In an ideal world, ever provider (ISP, or free service like Yahoo) will implement stricter MTA's. If the spam rejection can be pushed far enough up the chain, life for everyone will easier.

BTW, according to Philip Hazel (a message I recieved to a question I posed on the Exim mailing list), Exim 4 will offer much more functionality along these lines, including the invocation of C funtions after the DATA phase of the SMTP input. I guess this would be the spot to plug in Vipul's Razor, although I don't know what kind performance hit that would lead to. Mr. Hazel also pointed out that some stupid clients are in contravention of the RFC and will continue to try and delivery a message if they recieved 5xx after the DATA phase... oh well: they'll be using my bandwidth but they won't be putting any crap on my server.

I'm thankful for spam

[NitsujTPU]

Honestly, I'm quite thankful for spam, for two reasons:

I'll never be shy in the locker room again, and the ladies love me!

Now, if only I could shut that lady who keeps saying mean things about my dikky up, I'd be fine. Personally, I have no idea what her standards are.

tolerance

[interstellar_donkey]

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.

Statistics are misleading

[Durzel]

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.

Gmail + Thunderbird Bayesian filters = :-)

[CdBee]

I have a Gmail account I use for spammy stuff (posting on websites, joining forums (forae?), signing up for mailing lists) and I read it using Thunderbird and Gmail POP3

Considering what I use it for, I get astonishingly little spam through the gmail filter, and Thunderbird picks out the rest and moves it to my junk mail folder for periodic review. Twin filtering is the way to go...

spam lets me know my mail is working.

[artifex2004]

seriously, I'm so used to seeing some regularly that if a few hours pass, and I don't get any, (and this is AFTER all my filtering, that's how bad it is) I test mail my server to make sure it's all good.

Re:spam lets me know my mail is working.

[kyojin the clown]

i have been having loads of problems with this. we recently went from symantec's mail filter (haaaa hahahahaha) to ASSP (its brilliant) and now i am having to stay logged in to hotmail all day, so i can send people test email. they are so used to getting all the spam, now that it has gone away they constantly think the mail server is broken

here is a link for ASSP, if you like it give them money. http://assp.sourceforge.net/

Spam has destroyed the medium

[Monkelectric]

and the medium is no longer the message.

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?

The survey could be misleading...

[Eyeball97]

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?

Answer is easy...

[rdean400]

People are getting numb to spam like they're numb to postal junk mail.

All in the wording...

[Beolach]

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.

Heh. Riiight. Now get off the high horse.

[Moraelin]

If anything, you just illustrate why spam is a problem.

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 /. 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.)

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.

People accept most things..

[t_allardyce]

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.