Survey: Spam Driving Internet Users Away From E-mail  
调查显示垃圾邮件使用户疏远电子邮件
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By Robert MacMillan, washingtonpost.com Staff Writer

(中文大意)
　　3月18日公布的Pew Internet & American Life调查结果显示，新的联邦反垃圾邮件法对于遏制垃圾邮件冲击美国网络用户的电子邮箱并没有起到明显的作用。调查发现，日益严重的垃圾邮件问题已经导致将近30%的被调查者减少了使用电子邮件的频率。

　　在被调查者当中63%的电子邮件用户表示，垃圾邮件的增多使得他们对于电子邮件作为一种通信工具的可信度大打折扣，超过四分之三(77%)的被调查者表示，垃圾邮件使得上网的感受“变得不再美妙和令人厌烦”。

　　这次针对将近1400位互联网用户进行的电话调查是在2月份进行的，去年11月，美国总统布什签署了全美第一部联邦反垃圾邮件法。但是，在这段时间，反垃圾邮件专家并没有发现网上的垃圾邮件数量大幅减少，这些专家表示，垃圾邮件在任何时候已经占到了所有电子邮件当中的60%到80%。

　　在去年12月到今年2月这三个月里，接受调查的用户当中在家里收邮件的人有77%的表示他们收到的垃圾邮件数量相同甚至更多，在办公室收邮件的人有72%的也表示垃圾邮件数量没有减少。



A new federal anti-spam law has done little to decrease the amount of junk e-mail flooding Americans' in-boxes, according to a survey released today that found the mounting spam problem has prompted nearly 30 percent of respondents to reduce their use of e-mail.

Sixty-three percent of e-mail users who responded to the Pew Internet & American Life survey said that the increase in junk e-mail has made them less trusting of e-mail as a communications tool, and more than three-quarters of respondents -- 77 percent -- said that spam makes being online "unpleasant and annoying."

The findings highlight a trend that was described in a similar survey conducted by Pew last year in which 25 percent of respondents said they were using e-mail less because of spam.

The new Pew e-mail study, which was based on a phone survey of almost 1,400 Internet users contacted in February, comes almost three months after President Bush (news - web sites) signed the nation's first federal anti-spam law, known as the "Can-Spam Act." In the months since, anti-spam experts have not reported any significant decline in the volume of junk e-mail on the Internet, which they say accounts for 60 to 80 percent of e-mail traffic at any given time.

During that period, 77 percent of the Pew survey's respondents who receive e-mail at home said they were getting the same or more unsolicited missives; 72 percent of those who have e-mail accounts at work reported no decline in the amount of spam filling their inboxes. Thirty percent said they had reduced their use of e-mail because of spam, up from 25 percent who said they had done so in a similar survey conducted before the new law was approved.

"This is the first reading on the effect of Can-Spam which was meant to help begin solving this problem," said Pew Internet & American Life Project Director Lee Rainie. "It's still early in the life of the law obviously, but if in the early days the bad guys seem to be getting the upper hand from the good guys, that's not good."

A leading voice in the anti-spam movement echoed that point. "I don't know that these numbers say that the Can-Spam Act has caused an increase, but it certainly suggests that it hasn't helped decrease the amount of spam," said Ray Everett-Church, a board member on the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail (CAUCE).

Known as the Can-Spam Act, the federal law criminalizes some common spamming techniques, such as falsifying the "from" and subject lines in messages. It also orders marketers to abide by requests to "unsubscribe" from spam lists.

America Online spokesman Nicholas Graham said that the company disagrees with the Pew survey's suggestion that the federal law's impact has been minimal so far.

"I think we do agree that faith and confidence in e-mail is in danger of disintegrating before our very eyes. But overall, I would say as a company and as an industry we are no longer on the defensive when it comes to spam," he said. "We are winning this battle by battle. We know a lot more work needs to be done."

AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo and Earthlink last week announced that they filed Can-Spam Act lawsuits against hundreds of spammers. Graham said that AOL has seen a reduction in the amount of incoming spam since early March, though he said the actual amount is still being quantified.

"It's premature to judge the effectiveness of the Can-Spam Act 77 days after it becomes effective," said Carol Guthrie, spokeswoman for the law's cosponsor, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). "It's not time to write Can-Spam's obituary."

Pew's Rainie said the new survey does not necessarily indicate that Americans are turning away from e-mail altogether. "People are switching at least some level of communication back to the phone, but it might [also] be the case that instead of checking their e-mail multiple times a day, they instead just do it once per day," he said.

Doug Peckover, founder and president of Dallas-based software developer Privacy Inc., said that spam may be driving "fringe" Internet users away. "They don't depend on it for business, and for them, their pain threshold is a lot lower for you and me. These are the folks who are saying, 'You know, it's not worth it anymore.'"

Meanwhile, critics charge that the federal law is failing to make a serious dent in spam because it played into spammers' hands by pre-empting tougher state laws that gave individuals the right to sue spammers who refuse to stop sending unwanted e-mail. Others say the law draws no clear definition of who is a spammer. Technically, a porn marketer is treated the same as a major department store -- both are allowed to send unsolicited messages as long as they label their messages appropriately and stop sending additional messages when recipients request an unsubscribe.

"If you lump yourselves in with the pornographers, with fly-by-night organizations and you make it impossible for users to distinguish between the two, they are going to treat all commercial e-mail messages as garbage," said David Kramer, an expert on spam law at the Los Angeles law firm Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati.

Many of the law's critics blame groups like the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) for the law's shortcomings. DMA spokesman Lou Mastria agreed that there is a "general frustration with e-mail," but said a recent study funded by the group shows that e-mail marketing is serving a significant market, generating $32 billion in sales between November 2002 and November 2003.

So far, the federal government has not filed any lawsuits under the Can-Spam Act. The Federal Trade Commission is developing regulations for implementing the law and is drafting a report for Congress -- due in June -- on whether the agency should launch a national do-not-spam list similar to the existing do-not-call list for telemarketers. FTC Chairman Timothy Muris recently reiterated his opinion that the technical challenges and the international nature of the Internet would make it impossible to enforce a do-not-spam list.

"People are really abandoning e-mail," said Laura Atkins, president of the SpamCon Foundation, a nonprofit group dedicated to eliminating spam and other problems that inhibit e-mail communication. "[The] more unsolicited email that's being sent, the less and less people are going to purchase from it and the more they're going to hide their email address and stop using the Internet."