From the Reporters

Spam Soars -- But So Does Awareness

 

After leveling off over the summer, the volume of spam rose again in September, according to research by Brightmail Inc. 's Probe Network.

The percentage of Internet e-mails identified as spam, which had hovered between 48 and 50 % since May, jumped to 54 % in September, according to Brightmail, a San Francisco-based maker of anti-spam technology.

Unsolicited bulk e-mails for general goods and services -- such as printer cartridges and flat-rate long-distance plans -- accounted for 19 % of last month's spam total, Brightmail's research showed.

Other categories included financial services (15 %), "adult" Web sites (12 %), Internet- related services (11 %), and scams (10 %), followed by health (8 %) leisure (7 %), political (3 %), and religious or spiritual (1 %). The remaining 15 % of unsolicited bulk e-mails promoted products or services that fell outside the other categories.

At the same time, individual users are becoming more savvy about dealing with spam, according to the fourth annual DoubleClick Consumer E-mail Survey, conducted by Beyond Interactive Inc. for DoubleClick Inc. of New York, which sells online marketing tools and services.

Of the 1,000 consumers surveyed, more than 90 % identified spam as "e-mails intended to trick me into opening them" or "e-mails from senders that are unknown to me." Fully 65 % simply delete spam without reading it, typically by reading the subject line, up from 60 % last year.

Asked about spam-fighting technologies, nearly 53 % of those surveyed said they use bulk e-mail folders, up from just under 49 % in 2002. Other options included reporting spammers to Internet service providers (36%), downloading spam-filtering software (nearly 16 %), and establishing a second e-mail address for making online purchases (13.7%).

Just 4 % read spams, down from 5 % last year and 18 % in 2001, DoubleClick reported.

However, the survey emphasized, consumers acknowledged that not all commercial e-mail qualifies as spam. More than 90 % said they receive permission-based e-mail marketing from online merchants, traditional retailers, and catalog companies.