Commentary

Just an Online Minute... Can the Spam!

I don’t know about you, but each day for me starts with deleting email. It takes at least half and hour to delete junk, block senders, unsubscribe to things I never subscribed to, etc. Only after that, do I get to sort through the press releases and announcements that come to MediaPost, answer reader email, the usual work-related stuff. I tried a few of the spam-filtering applications out there and none of them seem to work, so I keep deleting and blocking.

Truth be told, as much as I love getting email, it’s become extremely frustrating. Sometimes I get so ‘delete-happy’ that important things slip through the cracks, legitimate senders get blocked and friends and colleagues start sending ”you never answer my email” emails (which always seems silly, but that’s another story).

I know I’m not alone. Spam is a huge problem in the workplace. A two-part national survey of office workers and IT professionals conducted recently by email filtering company SurfControl, found that most people are starting to get fed up with junk email and are looking to Congress for help. Most people also say they would support legislation that restricts pornographic spam, and that criminal penalties for spam that contains misleading or false information should be enacted.

The survey also found that almost 70% of respondents believed that legislation alone would not solve the problem and that lawmakers needed to supplement their efforts with technology in order to eliminate spam in the workplace.

A fine suggestion, except there’s little being done on both fronts – Congress has been slower than slow in making any legislative headway (perhaps because they’ve got bigger things to worry about and rightly so) and, as I said before, most technology solutions currently available on the market are not good enough to truly differentiate between junk and real email (I hope someone can prove me wrong on that one).

I’m still holding out hope for the Network Advertising Initiative, which was formed a little less than a month ago by 19 leading email service providers who plan to “find solutions to the spam problem and protect the appropriate use of permission-based email as a marketing and business communication tool.” Of course, they launched on January 21 and I haven’t heard a peep out of them since.

Sounds like it’s time for us marketers to take matters into our own hands. Concrete suggestions welcome.

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