• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, April 12, 2005

Spammers are still clogging e-mail in-boxes, but Web users don't mind as much as they used to, according to a recent report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

About one in four--22 percent--of 1,421 Internet users surveyed in January and February reported that spam caused them to reduce their use of e-mail, down from 29 percent in 2004 and 25 percent in June 2003. Two-thirds of respondents--67 percent--said spam made their online experiences unpleasant or annoying, down from 77 percent who said the same last year and 71 percent in 2003. Half of those surveyed--53 percent--said spam made them less trusting of e-mail, down from 62 percent last year and nearly the same as 2003's 52 percent.

More than one out of three respondents--35 percent--said they received phishing e-mails, seeking information that could be used for identity theft. That figure was almost identical to the results of a Bigfoot Interactive study released last month, which revealed that 34 percent of online users had been targeted by a phishing campaign.

Despite the well-publicized anti-spam measures--including last year's federal Can-Spam legislation--enough Internet users reward spammers to render the technique "profitable for some purveyors," stated the report. About 6 percent of respondents admitted ordering a product or service hawked in an unsolicited e-mail--comparable to the 5 percent who had done so in 2004 and 7 percent in 2003.

What's more, even phishing e-mails met with some success; two percent of respondents who received such messages provided the sender with personal financial information. About two-thirds of respondents--64 percent--said they wouldn't post their e-mail addresses to a Web site, down from 69 percent in 2003.

Spammers often send e-mail to addresses compiled from Web sites. But Web users are taking at least one step to discourage spam: increasingly, they are setting up "unusual" e-mail addresses--which are harder to come up with using random name-generating software, according to the report. Nineteen percent of respondents said they created such unusual e-mail addresses this year, up from 14 percent in 2003. Pornographic spam appears to be on the wane, with just 63 percent of respondents saying they had ever received x-rated spam, down from 71 percent last year.