Golden Leads

If you did not have a chance to read this one today you should.

I found this study to be right on the mark. I know that I wake up each day to on average 110 emails in my junk folder. It used to bother me, but now, I just delete it and move on. I would say that my thoughts would be different if I was getting ones that were hard to tell or too much, but the junk folder is an easy solution to set rules for. Now this being said, it does hurt email marketing that there is so much of it and it can really cause issues with the sending of spam that looks to be coming from your domain. I actually had a co-worker come to me and say that we were being spammed from one of our domains. I quickly showed them how to read the headers of an email and tell that it was just ghosted and not sent. But how does this bode to someone that really has no idea? This is the part of spam that worries me the most. As it can really damage a brand quickly and you have no way to defend against it.

Read the study on the next page.

Spam’s on the rise, but U.S. Web users are becoming increasingly nonchalant about it, according to a new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The report, based on a survey of 2,200 adults, found that spam appeared to be surging in personal accounts; 37% of the respondents said spam had increased in their personal e-mail from last year, while 29% said they were now seeing more spam in their work accounts than one year earlier.

At the same time, respondents also indicated that spam isn’t as troubling as it once was. Twenty-eight percent said they didn’t consider spam a problem at all, up from 16% in 2003, and only 18% considered spam a “big problem,” down from 25%.

That people are somewhat blasé about spam by now shouldn’t be that surprising. After all, unlike other nuisances such as pop-ups, spyware or viruses, spam at least can be deleted fairly. What’s more — assuming that the spam is only an ad and doesn’t contain malicious code, or links to sites with malicious codes — it also won’t hurt computers. Additionally, as users have gotten more savvy, they’ve learned better how to manage spam via controls in their e-mail programs.

Of course, despite the greater sophistication of Web users today, the fact remains that spam only persists because users respond to it; otherwise, spammers would have long since moved on to other money-making schemes.

Thanks to The Email Wars for this great article.