The survey, conducted between February 15 and March 7 of this year, posed questions concerning spam to a representative sample of 2,200 American adults. According to a report issued by Pew senior research fellow Deborah Fallows, while 37 percent of respondents reported they are receiving more spam to their personal email account and 29 percent reported receiving more spam to their work email account in recent months, only 18 percent of respondents considered spam a “big problem.”
In a similar survey conducted by Pew in June of 2003, 25 percent of respondents said they considered spam a “big problem,” while only 16 percent said that spam “is not a problem at all.” In the new survey, the percentage of respondents who said spam is not a problem rose to 28 percent.
According to Pew’s report, one reason why users are not having as big a problem with spam now is a reduction in one specific type of spam — the sexually explicit variety.
“Users also report less exposure to pornographic spam, which to many people is the most offensive type of unsolicited email,” Fallows wrote in the Pew report detailing the survey results.
The results of the Pew survey indicate a “steady and dramatic reduction in the porn spam” since the 2003 spam survey, according to Fallows’ report. In 2003, 71 percent of respondents reported having received pornographic spam, while only 52 percent of users reported it in the latest survey.
Among the respondents, significantly fewer women (46 percent) than men (58 percent) reported receiving sexually explicit spam. According to Pew, this discrepancy is significant because women are more likely than men to find porn spam offensive.
“Since first reporting about spam, we noticed that spam with pornographic or adult content constitutes a case by itself,” Fallows wrote. “Compared with every other type of spam — for drugs, beauty products, financial opportunities — porn spam elicited intense and visceral reactions from Internet users, particularly women. Their personal comments were reflected in the data as well.”
The survey results indicate that users have become more adept in addressing the issue of spam than they were in years past, as well.
“Users increasingly apply filters to keep spam out of their in-boxes,” Fallow noted, adding that 71 percent of respondents to the new survey said they use filters provided by their ISP or employer, up from 65 percent in a January 2005 survey. Forty-one percent of users said they apply their own filters (as opposed to those provided by an ISP or employer), up from 33 percent in the 2005 survey.
While users report being less troubled by spam and receiving less porn spam, the amount of email phishing observed by respondents to the new survey was consistent with the results of the 2005 survey.
In 2005, when asked if they had “received unsolicited email requesting personal financial information such as a bank account number or Social Security number,” 35 percent of respondents answered yes; in the new survey the figure was 36 percent.
