New Report On Spam Shows How Smart You Are

Posted by Ken

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According to a phone survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, spam is on the rise, but fewer Americans are bothered by it. Specifically, the frustration users have with spam has dropped to 18 percent from just three and a half years ago. The reason for this decrease in being bothered is that email users have become more adept at handling these “gnats of the Internet”.

Another reason is that there has been a change in the type of spam being delivered to a user’s email inbox. For example, the report cites that pornographic spam is not as prevalent as it used to be. Over the past three years, spam of this type has gone from 71 percent to 52 percent today.

One highlight I found interesting in the report is that Web users over the age of 50 are less likely to find spam as annoying as younger users. I don’t know if that’s because the older generation doesn’t use email as much as their younger counterparts or what, but I suppose they’ve left the worrying to those “whipper-snappers”.

The survey shows promise, too. People are smarter about spam than they were a few years ago:

Users are making more use of the spam filters that are provided by their employers or they use filters of their own (up to 71 percent of users do this). So even though spam continues to rise, less of it is actually reaching the user’s eyes.
Being able to recognize spam has increased.
About 44 percent of Web users are better about not leaving spammers an easy way to get their email addresses.
And less than 25 percent of users avoid the temptation of clicking on links in spam messages.

If you’d like to know more about how to see less spam in your inbox, I wrote an article that you’ll find beneficial: 4 Ways to Protect Your Email Inbox

[tags]spam,tips,productivity,survey,web,internet,reports[/tags]

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