Survey: Spam, and what it does to you

SPAMfighter announced the findings of its first quarterly SPAMFighter Community Watch Behavioral Survey, which aims to assess the current attitudes and behaviors towards spam.

The survey involved over 1,000 participants, and (besides sharing that 30% of them would sacrifice their morning coffee to be rid of spam) here is what they say:

• A waste of precious time – 55% noted significant frustration caused by spam, while half admitted spam caused physical anger, citing time wasting and the unrelenting nature of spam as the biggest causes. Over 25% said spam wasted up to 5-10 minutes of their day, with another 12% confirming it took over 10 minutes of each day – that’s 2.5 days per year wasted due to spam
• Missing important e-mails – 40% attributed high volumes of spam as the cause for missing an important customer request (25%) or missing an email from family and friends (60%).

The survey also set out to gain a better understanding of consumers’ current observations of spam and spam mishaps:

• Drug-related spam (e.g. Viagra-oriented spam) was confirmed as the most frequently received in the past month with health-related spam (e.g. Acai/diet spam) following in second
• 69% admitted to accidentally opening a spam email, of those that did, 46% reported doing so only once, while 32% reported doing so at least once a month, 14% at least once a week, and another 7% admitted at least once a day
• Of those duped, (24%) cited promotional spam (e.g. travel/airfare ticket/shopping discount spam) as proving to be the trickiest.