Survey Says: Americans Want To Can Spam

This just in: Americans hate spam.

It's not exactly earth-shaking news, but a new survey, financed by a spam-filtering company, reaffirms what we already knew: Spam is a pain and users want it stopped.

An impressive 88 percent of the 1,400 people surveyed said they support antispam legislation, especially to curb the proliferation of pornography. That support came from respondents across the political spectrum, according to pollster Public Opinion Strategies. The survey--actually two surveys conducted on separate dates--was commissioned by SurfControl, a London-based spam filtering company.

Of the people interviewed, 488 use a PC at work to access the Internet or e-mail. Of that number, more than half (56 percent) said their companies used technology to control spam and said they were seeing less spam as a result.

The surveys were conducted Dec. 14 through Dec. 15, 2002, and again on Jan. 7 through Jan. 9. Then the data were merged.

Some legislators, including Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Wyo.), have said a spam bill has good chance of passage this year. Last year he and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) introduced a bill that would require e-marketers to include a working return address on all e-mail. Much spam now comes with no such return address. The bill would institute penalties of up to $500,000 for sending unlawful messages and would enable states to bring suits against spammers.

Spam is not only a consumer nuisance, it is costing U.S. businesses untold millions in wasted server and mailbox storage, bandwidth waste and lost productivity as workers sort through their messages. (See story.)

Earlier this week, a New York State legislator, Republican assemblyman David McDonough, proposed a bill backing the creation of a "no-mail" and "no e-mail" list to be maintained by the New York Consumer Protection Board.

Spam, or unsolicited junk e-mail, has been a hot spot for years, but the sheer volume has reached the point where users are biting back. Public pressure has gotten so intense that even the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) last October said it would back legislation to battle "the rising volume of spam inundating consumers' e-mailboxes," according to a statement on its site.

The DMA's well-founded fear is that spam hurts legitimate marketers by irritating prospective buyers. In that sense, the antispam movement mirrors growing consumer demand for "no-call" lists for telephone marketers.

A bevy of vendors such as SurfControl and Brightmail specialize in antispam technology. And antivirus vendors Network Associates, Trend Micro and Symantec are sticking their toes in too. In addition, e-mail software companies IBM's Lotus Software Group and Microsoft are building more antispam capabilities into their mail offerings.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Have your anti-spam solution featured in CRN. The CRN Test Center is taking applications from solution providers who have installed an innovative spam solution at a customer site. You must apply by February 28, 2003. To register, visit www.crn.com/spam.

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