 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Spam, Spam - And More To Come Monika Merkes monika@melbpc.org.au |
SPAM is the trademark for a canned meat product, but the term spam
has entered the dictionaries of the English and several other languages carrying a different meaning. For the
Internet community, spam has come to mean "unsolicited usually commercial e-mail sent to a large number of
addresses" http://www.m-w.com/. Its origin is attributed to a skit on the
British television series Monty Python's Flying Circus in which a group of Vikings sing a chorus of
SPAM, SPAM, SPAM... at increasing volumes in an attempt to drown out other conversation. The producers
of SPAM Luncheon Meat do not object to the term being used to describe unsolicited bulk e-mail. However, they
request that it should be spelled in lower case letters to distinguish it from their trademark SPAM http://www.spam.com/ci/ci_in.htm.
Spam has become an increasing annoyance to most people who use e-mail. How annoying is it, and why do people
keep sending unsolicited bulk e-mails? As part of her research undertaken for the company SurfControl, Dr
Monica Whitty1 from the University of Western Sydney http://www.uws.edu.au/ashs/staff.html asked over 500 Australians
aged between 16 and 66 years questions about spam and the workplace. This is what she found: 75% of the
people who were surveyed reported that they had received spam, 17% had received harassing e-mails, and 49%
had received offensive material at work. The more frequently people used the Internet at work, the more
likely they were to report having received spam and offensive material. More men than women reported
receiving spam in the workplace and receiving offensive material through email at work. The types of email
that people found to be objectionable included the following:
- 74% - offers for e-mail lists
- 88% - credit offers
- 87% - money making offers
- 90% - chain letters
- 17% - jokes
- 77% - pornography
Research by the Coalition Against Unsolicited Bulk Email, Australia (CAUBE.AU) http://australianit.news.com.au/common/print/0,7208,3589867%5e15306%5e%5enbv%5e,00.html found that Internet users received six times more unsolicited messages in 2001 than in 2000. Most of the spamming occurred during the Christmas-January period. CAUBE.AU also found that Australia accounted for approximately 16% of all spam received http://www.caube.org.au/australia.htm. This is very high, considering that less than 2% of all Internet users are Australians http://cyberatlas.internet.com/.
The authors of the recent U.S. report "Getting Serious Online" http://www.pewinternet.org/ observed an increase in spam complaints. More than four in ten Internet users (44%) commented in March 2001 that unwanted spam e-mails were a problem for them, a large increase compared to a survey in March 2000 which found that 33% of Internet users complained about spam. More than half of the Internet users surveyed for this report had received an e-mail with adult content or advertising adult websites (56%), and 20% said that this happened frequently. Experienced users of the Internet were twice as likely to receive messages with adult content than Internet novices. This might explain why they found spam to be a greater hassle than did new users.
There are many reasons why people dislike spam, including concerns about privacy and resistance to commercialising the Internet. Most people who receive a substantial amount of unsolicited e-mails would resent the additional time it takes to manage their e-mail. The time spent deleting spam also comes at a cost to businesses. For example, a study commissioned by the European commission found that junk e-mail costs Internet users euro 10 billion a year worldwide
http://europa.eu.int/comm/internal_market/en/dataprot/studies/spam.htm
Ignore and delete may be the most common way of managing spam. So why do people still send out bulk e-mails if these are perceived as annoying and may not even be read? E-mail is virtually free to the sender - it shifts the cost from the advertiser to the recipient, for example, the cost of the time spent downloading spam and spam-fighting efforts by Internet Service Providers. For businesses this is arguably a cheap way of promoting a product or service, particularly as more and more e-mail addresses find their way onto commercial lists that are available for purchase. But is it effective?
I wanted to find out how successful commercial bulk email is. An Internet search with Google did not yield many facts. Nor did a search on the ABI database which includes a large collection of business related journals, newspapers and magazines with full-text articles. Success rates quoted by companies trading in bulk e-mail marketing services and software did not appeal to me as a credible source. I found numerous sites dedicated to fighting spam, many articles providing advice on how to deal with spam, several sites and articles with advice for businesses on the fine line between added value and marketing spam. However, I did not find credible evidence that unsolicited bulk e-mail actually achieves what it sets out to accomplish, eg. to sell products and services.
It appears that we can expect more rather than less spam in the near future. However, with so many people finding unsolicited bulk e-mail annoying, and without proof that spam is an effective tool for promoting products and services, the question remains: What do spammers get out of it?
1 Unpublished research, reproduced here with the permission of Dr. Whitty (m.whitty@wws.edu.au)
| Other Spam-Related Hyperlinks Unwanted Spam Mail http://www.melbpc.org.au/faq/spammail.htm Spam FAQs http://www.spamfaq.net/terminology.shtml A Brief History of SPAM, and Spam http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,44111,00.html Origin of the term "spam" to mean net abuse http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamterm.html Spam links http://www.geocities.com/spamresources/spamlinks.htm How to avoid being spammed http://www.caube.org.au/avoid.htm Spam is Bad http://spam.abuse.net/others/simplespam.shtml Spam: It's completely out of control. By Stefanie Olsen. ZDNet News 21/03/02 http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-865442.html |
Reprinted from the May 2002 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
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