• by Shankar Gupta , August 4, 2006

More than one in three consumers mistakenly report e-mail that they have signed up for as "junk" or "spam," according to a report released Thursday by e-mail marketing services company Return Path.

The study, based on a June survey of 2,035 Web users, found that 36 percent of consumers hit the "spam" button when they want to unsubscribe to e-mail that they have agreed to receive. Almost that same proportion--31 percent--said they don't use the "unsubscribe" links that are found in commercial e-mails.

The overreporting of spam is considered problematic for e-mail marketers because senders that have been wrongly characterized as spammers are at risk of ending up on blacklists by e-mail service providers.

But consumers seem to feel they have no choice. When asked why they didn't use the "unsubscribe" links, consumers indicated that they suspected that the clicking on unsubscribe would just result in yet more e-mail. Reasons given by respondents for not trusting unsubscribe links included: "If I do I just get more junk email," "I think email clients only use this as a ruse to certify an email address," and "Most often they do not work."

The study also found that a large proportion of the e-mails consumers receive every day are commercial in nature. Nearly half of respondents said that more than 60 percent of the e-mails they received were commercial mailings.