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Users divided on the meaning of spam 
Monday, July 29 2002
by Ciaran Buckley


Businesses in the US and UK agree that spam is a problem, but according to
MessageLabs many users cannot reach a consensus on its definition. 









According to MessageLabs' recent survey, an average of 15 percent of e-mails
received by businesses contain spam. One third of the respondents to the UK
survey said that spam was currently a problem and three quarters of the
respondents expected it to become a problem in the future. 



Meanwhile, over 50 percent of the respondents to the US survey said that spam
represents 30 percent of their daily e-mail load. Furthermore, around half of
those questioned who had spam-filtering technology in place said that it was
"ineffective" or "very ineffective."



Despite this deluge of unsolicited mail, approximately 58 percent of those
questioned in the US said that they do not want to get rid of spam altogether,
but need a better way to filter the messages they want from the messages that
they would like to block.





"The problem is not only that it gets through, but that firms don't know how to
define it," explained Jos White, marketing director at e-mail security
development firm MessageLabs. "With viruses it is easy, but one man's spam is
potentially another's useful information." Filtering is difficult to implement
because users are unable to agree on a definition of spam, MessageLabs claimed. 




According to the survey, 90 percent of UK respondents said that spam was
promotional or marketing e-mail from someone they did not know, whereas 89
percent said that it was an e-mail containing information clearly irrelevant to
their work. Eighty-one percent said it was news or information from someone they
didn't know and 71 percent considered it to be an e-mail they did not request,
regardless of content or sender.





Only 29 percent said that a promotional e-mail from an organisation they know was
spam, with only 12 percent saying the same for news or information from a source
they recognised. In contrast nearly a third defined a mass circulation business
e-mail from within the company as spam.





The survey was carried out among 160 UK IT directors and managers and 200 general
business managers across the US.