* Survey considers whether vendors, ISPs, or the government should take responsibility
We ran a survey in January asking technical and non-technical e-mail users their opinions about several issues related to e-mail use, spam and other topics. One of the key issues we investigated was e-mail users’ perceptions about the level of responsibility various groups have in solving the spam problem, as well as how well each group is living up to this responsibility.
Not surprisingly, the group that is perceived as most responsible for stopping the spam problem is the vendors of products that are advertised through spam; 84% of e-mail users believe that these vendors have a significant amount of responsibility for stopping spam. A very close second in our survey were the ISPs, which 83% of e-mail users feel bear a significant responsibility to stop spam. Interestingly, the third group that e-mail users feel is most responsible for stopping spam is themselves; 70% of individuals feel that they and their fellow e-mail users are responsible for stopping spam by maintaining appropriate and up-to-date anti-virus, anti-spyware and firewall capabilities on their home computers. Forty-five percent of users believe that national governments are responsible for stopping spam.
So who’s falling down on the job? When asked how effective various groups have been in stopping the spam problem, only 10% responded that vendors whose stuff is advertised via spam have been effective in curbing spam, only 26% believe that ISPs have been effective in doing so and only 9% of users believe that national governments have been effective. By contrast, 66% e-mail users believe that they have effective at stopping the spam problem.
In my opinion, there are two key takeaways from this survey. First, a significant burden has been placed on ISPs to solve the spam problem, since e-mail users believe that ISPs are just about as responsible as the vendors whose products are advertised in spam. This means ISPs will have to aggressively continue their efforts to stop spam by offering anti-virus and anti-spyware capabilities in order to rehabilitate as many zombies in their networks as possible. Second, while e-mail users believe that government has a fairly high level of responsibility in stopping spam, government is also perceived as the least effective player in doing so – the perception that laws like CAN-SPAM will be effective at ultimately stopping spam appears to be very modest.
Some of the results from this survey are available at: https://www.ostermanresearch.com/results/orresults_2005-01.pdf
