The pain of spam diminishes – survey

People are becoming less bothered by spam, according to a new survey, despite it deluging inboxes worldwide.

The research carried out by the Pew Internet and American Life Project on 2,200 American adults found that 71 per cent of respondents now use a filter to weed out spam.

While people are taking more measures to combat spam, it is becoming less of a pain for them. When the same survey was taken back in 2003, 25 per cent of respondent saw spam as a big problem; however this figure dropped to 18 per cent this year.

Senior research fellow Deborah Fallows said that the findings indicated that people are less bothered by spam than before.

‘On the positive side, the percentage of users who say spam is not at all a problem has risen from 16 per cent to 28 per cent,’ she said. ‘And the portion of email users who take the middle ground, describing spam as an annoyance but not a big problem, hovers at about half (51 per cent) down from 57 per cent in 2003.’

The report said this finding was underscored by other data. Fewer users said spam has made using email unpleasant or annoying, 63 per cent in this survey, down from 67 per cent in 2005, 77 per cent in 2004, and 71 per cent in 2003

According to figures from the survey, there appear to be several reasons why fewer people say that spam is a big problem for them. First, the volume of the most offensive kind of spam has decreased. And second, people are becoming more knowledgeable about spam, and they know better how to handle it.

‘Since first reporting about spam, we noticed that spam with pornographic or adult content constitutes a case by itself,’ said Fallows. ‘Compared with every other type of spam – for drugs, beauty products, financial opportunities – porn spam elicited intense and visceral reactions from Internet users, particularly women.’

Since the survey was first taken, there appeared to steady decrease in the amount of such spam. The research showed that 52 per cent of email users reported receiving porn spam, compared to 63 per cent two years ago.

The research said that significantly fewer women reported receiving porn spam (46 per cent) than men (58 per cent), which said Fallows, magnified this trend.