Overview

Spam, which by the middle of 2003 represented about half of all email messages, has made online life unpleasant or annoying to nearly three-quarters of email users. People feel that spam has undermined the reliability of email and its effectiveness as a tool for communicating. They are bothered by spam’s deceptive and often unsavory content, by the time it takes to deal with spam, and they are frustrated by their lack of control over the influx of spam. The volume of spam in personal email accounts far outscored the volume in work email accounts, due in part to costly measures that defend most workplaces against spam. People want to do the right thing to counteract spam, but very often they are not sure what that is.