Subject: [Asrg] Spam is good?

From: "Roy S. Walker" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 16:33:11 +0100

Folks, 

I'm new to the list, and haven't trawled the archives, so possibly I missed something about the definition of Spam....

I am interested in the fact that in a recent survey (http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/secu/article.php/2201291), 28% of respondents replied to spam and 8% actually ordered in response to spam.   It seems that some people like (some) spam.

How should this affect mechanisms for stopping spam? (if at all...)

Cheers
Roy

--
Roy S. Walker

This email has been scanned by the ADVASCAN(tm) antivirus / antispam service. 
For more information please visit www.advascan.com.

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From: Steve Atkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 11:03:39 -0700

> How should this affect mechanisms for stopping spam? (if at all...)

"'spam' is ill-defined" is the main datapoint that survey provides.

Concentrating on stopping "spam" is a complete waste of effort. Stopping
unsolicited bulk email is the useful target for the ASRG to concentrate
on, and that is not affected at all by the mailshell survey.

(Discussion within this WG would be far more productive if the word "spam"
 were used only in the context of "how to communicate an issue to end users"
 and were only used in quotes then.)

Cheers,
  Steve
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From: Yakov Shafranovich <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 13:27:38 -0400

At 04:33 PM 5/15/2003 +0100, Roy S. Walker wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: (null)
>
>Folks,
>
>I'm new to the list, and haven't trawled the archives, so possibly I 
>missed something about the definition of Spam....
>
>I am interested in the fact that in a recent survey 
>(http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/secu/article.php/2201291), 28% of 
>respondents replied to spam and 8% actually ordered in response to 
>spam.   It seems that some people like (some) spam.
>

In general we are seeking a technical solution but here are some 
interesting quotes from the article:

" 50 percent of the more than 1,000 respondents to a March 2003 Mailshell 
survey indicated that they believe they are at least partially responsible 
for the volume of spam they receive. More than one-quarter (28 percent) 
admittedly replied to spam, and another 8 percent have actually made 
purchases via unsolicited promotional e-mail. "

" according to an April 2003 poll conducted by Osterman Research, nearly 
half (46 percent) of the respondents inadvertently deleted or overlooked a 
legitimate piece of e-mail. "

"The Mailshell survey found that 23 percent of their respondents had their 
computers infected with a virus, worm, tracking device, or other invasive 
code,"

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Yakov Shafranovich / <[email-masked]>
SolidMatrix Research, a division of SolidMatrix Technologies, Inc.
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"One who watches the wind will never sow, and one who keeps his eyes on
the clouds will never reap" (Ecclesiastes 11:4)
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