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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.