Widespread Use Despite Abuse
The good news: almost every Internet user has an active e-mail account. The bad news: many of the incoming messages are unsolicited.
The good news: almost every Internet user has an active e-mail account. The bad news: many of the incoming messages are unsolicited.
Thirty-five percent of the email sent to the 115 million active email users by the end of 2002 will be unsolicited, or “spam” mail, according to Jupiter Research (a unit of this site’s corporate parent). The firm determined that 93 percent of those that go online are active email users – expecting to climb to 98 percent by 2007 – resulting in infiltrations of spam in every user’s inbox.
As the number of email accounts increase, so do the proliferation of unsolicited messages. Jupiter found that most online users maintain one or two email addresses, and nearly one-quarter of them use three or more personal email accounts at least once per month, with younger surfers (18 to 34 years of age) more likely to have more than one email address.
Veteran Internet users are more apt to have a number of email addresses, with one account that is specifically set up to receive commercial messages.
While the majority of messages in inboxes are considered spam (35 percent), Jupiter found that email from friends and family follows right behind at 34 percent. E-mail from companies that Internet users want comprises 17 percent; work or school related messages account for 8 percent; and the miscellaneous category represents 6 percent of messages.
Anti-spam technology firm BrightMail estimates that more than 5 million unique spam attacks were unleashed during August 2002, far exceeding the 1.5 million from the year prior. Measurement and analysis from BrightMail found that unsolicited email fit into nine different categories:
Surveys conducted by Osterman Research in April 2001 indicate that Internet users are not confident that the spam epidemic is going to dissipate. Among organizations of up to 200 employees, 80 percent say that the spam problem is worse or no better than one year ago, while 68 percent of organizations with more that 200 employees say the problem is worse or no better.
Osterman’s August 2002 survey on email content filtering indicated that more than half (54 percent) of the 127 respondents’ organizations had implemented anti-spam capability, and 40 percent had anti-pornography filters in place. However, only 25 percent were “very satisfied” with their ant-spam software, with most (35 percent) being “somewhat satisfied.”