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

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 ?

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.

'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

[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.

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.

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?

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.