We can learn to love it too.
Everybody, supposedly, hates spam. Perhaps it's one
of the few topics that unite us. But is the we that hates spam truly a
collective we? It turns out that some people don't mind it at all. At least that's
what a recent report suggests.
Yahoo Canada recently released it's "annual internet review". Among
the most interesting items in that (somewhat elusive)
review is
a report that Canadians aren't overly concerned with spam:
The annual Internet review by Yahoo Canada reports that about one out of three Yahoo e-mail users said they opened spam messages because they had interesting subject lines. Forty-eight per cent of users respond to spam messages by unsubscribing. Others say they respond to the junk messages to give spammers a "piece of their mind." Two out of five users opened spam messages because they looked like they came from a trusted source.
This paragraph doesn't tell us that everybody loves spam. It even suggests that
half of the people who receive it are upset enough by it to respond with a complaint
(an activity of highly dubious worth, if not simply a total waste of time). But
how do we explain the third of users who open spam because of "interesting
subject lines", or the forty percent that say these messages seem to come
from "a trusted source"? Of course I don't know how much junk mail people
receive. If it's only five or ten junk messages a day, then I suppose that it
shouldn't be considered such a nuisance - especially if for some people this is
all the mail they get. But what happens when you get almost four
million spam messages a day?
Go to: Fort PC.