• by January 5, 2003

The public is up in arms about spamming and does not want to take it anymore. Among those who are online, fully 80% say that they find spamming very annoying, a huge increase from the 49% who felt this way two and a half years ago. As a result of this hostility, an overwhelming 74% to 12% majority of those online favors making mass spamming illegal. This support for banning mass spamming is found among every demographic group. Between 70% and 80% of all age groups, all income groups, both sexes, blacks, whites and Hispanics, Republicans and Democrats all favor such a ban.

These are the results of The Harris Poll conducted online by Harris Interactive between November 22 and December 2, 2002 among a national sample of 2,221 adults, aged 18 or over, who are online.

While many people are annoyed by many different kinds of spam, messages selling pornography (91%), mortgages and loans (79%), investments (68%) and real estate (61%) annoy the largest number of people.

While those who are angry about spamming have increased dramatically, some other problems associated with online activity have decreased since March 2002 when some of the same questions were asked in another Harris Poll. These changes surely reflect improvements in technology, with more people having faster connections to the Web, and the increased sophistication of Internet users. As a result, those who are very annoyed by "how long you have to wait for the information you want to come up on your screen" have fallen from 25% to 17% of all online users. Also, those who are very annoyed by "how long it takes to find the websites you need" have fallen from 20% to only 10%.

Two other kinds of annoyance have not changed very much since 2000. Those who are very annoyed by "information you get from the Web which is not accurate or reliable" are relatively unchanged at 32%, compared to 35% in 2000. And those who are very annoyed at the "times when you need help from someone outside your home to make your system work properly" have not changed much at 21% now, compared to 18% two years ago.

So what?

A look at these numbers and the rapidly growing anger at mass spamming, with the large majority in favor of banning it, suggests that - if our elected politicians listen to their constituents - spamming may go the way of mass faxing. Unsolicited mass faxing was banned. Can mass spamming be far behind?