Spam still increasing, but users are less bothered by it

That just about sums up the latest Pew survey.

The volume of spam is growing in Americans’ personal and workplace email accounts, but email users are less bothered by it.

Spam continues to plague the internet as more Americans than ever say they are getting more spam than in the past. But while American internet users report increasing volumes of spam, they also indicate that they are less bothered by it than before. Users have become more sophisticated about dealing with spam; fully 71% of email users use filters offered by their email provider or employer to block spam. Users also report less exposure to pornographic spam, which to many people is the most offensive type of unsolicited email. Spam has not become a significant deterrent to the use of email, as some observers speculated it might when unsolicited email first began flooding users’ inboxes
several years ago. But it continues to degrade the integrity of email. Some 55% of email users say they have lost trust in email because of spam.

Full report here.