MIKE WENDLAND: Spam pushes many to stop using e-mail
BY MIKE WENDLAND
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

Jason Raznick is a Birmingham mortgage banker who's starting to lose touch with business colleagues, close friends and professional mentors.

The reason? He's burned out on spam.

Raznick gets so much junk e-mail every day that wading through his inbox to separate the important messages from the spam just isn't worth the hassle.

I'm actually ignoring or neglecting much of the e-mail correspondence that was once very important to me, he says.

He's the victim of a trend. A new study out today by the Pew Internet & American Life Project says the spam deluge -- now reportedly accounting for half of the 30 million e-mails sent each day -- is undermining the integrity of e-mail and degrading the much-ballyhooed Internet lifestyle.

Wednesday evening, the U.S. Senate voted 97-0 for tough new limits on spam. President George W. Bush has said he'll sign the bill if it passes the House, but it still faces challenges there.

As policymakers debate -- but so far are unable to control -- a tidal wave of get-rich-quick schemes, sexual-enhancement offers and pornography, the public seems to be backing away from the Net itself. If that trend continues, the Pew report argues, it could threaten the entire technology industry.

Spam is ruining a good thing, says Deborah Fallows, the Pew senior research fellow who wrote the report. E-mail was supposed to be efficient, reliable and trustworthy. Now, it's more often than not intrusive, misleading and disgusting.

The study found that 25 percent of all e-mail users say an ever-increasing volume of spam has reduced their overall use of e-mail. More than half of all users -- 52 percent -- say spam has made them less trusting of e-mail in general.

Fallows says the public's apparent growing distrust of e-mail could push Congress into enacting meaningful controls and encourage technology companies to develop more reliable spam-filtering software.

E-mail is too important to the economy for us to allow it to be threatened like this, she said. I think the day of the spammers is coming to a close.

It's no wonder spam is making people angry: It's causing us more work.

The report says about 12 percent of home e-mail users spend a half hour or more a day removing the junk from their mailboxes. At work, where commercial e-mail filters do a better job of trashing the junk, about 10 percent say they spend a half hour or more on the task.

Matt Friedman, a public relations and marketing vice president with Marx Layne & Co. in Farmington Hills, says he gets so much spam through his office e-mail account that he is often unable to delete it all during the workday.

So I spend time on my laptop at home in the evenings, early mornings or weekends deleting spam, he said.

That's a complaint Fallows has heard before. It's no longer fun, she said. It's an ordeal.

Sean O'Bryan, an attorney from Metamora, gets about 100 e-mails a day through two accounts and says the vast majority is spam. It just doesn't end, he says, no matter what commercial spam-fighting programs he's used to try to block the junk.

As a result, the e-mail messages and updates he used to exchange with family members around the country have all but stopped.

We were all keeping in touch with e-mail. Even my 80-year-old father has a computer, he says. But over the past year, the junk clogged everyone's boxes, and rather than enjoying checking your e-mail, you feel like you are walking through a bawdy carnival midway alone after dark each time you press send and receive.

The Pew study offers some insight into why spam is so prolific.

Surprisingly, despite the anger and skepticism survey respondents voice toward spam, one-third report pursuing an offer made in a spam message by clicking on a link to find further information. And 7 percent had actually ordered a product or service that was offered in an unsolicited e-mail.

Pew said it didn't collect enough data to make broad assumptions on those figures. It theorizes that many of those purchases through spam were made before the consumer had a lot of e-mail experience.

But it notes that some bulk e-mailers claim that a positive response rate of even 0.001 percent can be profitable. With 15 billion spam messages being sent out each day, the Pew report suggests a lot of money is still being made.



Contact MIKE WENDLAND at 313-222-8861 or mwendland@freepress.com.

Copyright © 2003 Detroit Free Press Inc.
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