WASHINGTON, April 11 (UPI) -- E-mail spam might be a blight that is gumming up electronic commerce and personal mailboxes alike, but just as with death and taxes, the public seems to be growing accustomed to its inevitability.
Ferris Research estimated in a recent study that spam will cost the global economy about $50 billion in 2005, including $17 billion lost by U.S. businesses alone.
The federal government is attempting to fight back, winning a recent stiff sentence in a Virginia circuit court -- nine years of jail time -- against North Carolina spammer Jeremy Jaynes. So are software companies, which continue to look for the perfect technological mousetrap to stop spam.
Still, the poll, by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, reported that although many e-mail users are getting more spam than a year ago -- since Congress passed the CAN-SPAM Act -- "they are minding it less" and the the harmful impact of unsolicited messages is diminishing for them.
More than one-third of e-mail users polled said they also received phishing solicitations, or unsolicited e-mail requesting personal financial information.
In addition, the Pew survey found:
--28 percent of respondents with a personal e-mail account said they are receiving more spam than a year ago, while 22 percent said they are getting less.
--21 percent of users with a work e-mail account said they are getting more spam than a year ago, while 16 percent said they are getting less.
--53 percent of e-mail users polled said spam has made them less trusting of e-mail, down from 62 percent a year ago.
--22 percent of e-mail users said spam has reduced their overall use of e-mail, again, down from 29 percent a year ago.
--Likewise, 67 percent said spam has made being online unpleasant or annoying, compared to 77 percent a year ago.
Still, more than half of all internet users polled, or 52 percent, complained spam is a big problem, even though the survey found people had been receiving less porn spam, which they described as "a uniquely troubling form of spam for most users and particularly for women."
The poll found 63 percent of e-mail users said they have received porn spam over the past year, down 8 percentage points from those surveyed a year ago, and 29 percent of those users said they are now receiving less porn spam, compared to 16 percent who said they are getting more.
In a first-time measure of phishing, 35 percent of respondents said they have received such e-mail.
Sophos Inc., a network security company in Lynnfield, Mass., reported last week the United States is the top spam-exporting country, exporting an average of 35.70 percent of all spam for the first quarter of this year.
"Even though the United States is still responsible for producing more than one-third of the world's total volume of spam, the percentage has decreased," said Gregg Mastoras, senior security analyst at Sophos. "The percentage of spam produced by the United States has fallen 12 percent since January compared to other countries. This trend is likely because many ISPs are enforcing policies to ensure that they do not knowingly provide network services to spammers."
Mastoras added that although there has been some speculation the CAN-SPAM Act has helped to thwart spam, "at this point we haven't seen any evidence that would correlate the drop off to the Act -- time will tell."
Adding complexity to the spam phenomenon is the fact that it often originates from so-called zombie computers -- PCs that have been compromised by hackers or virus writers, Mastoras noted.
"Last month, Sophos estimated that more than 50 percent of the world's spam came from zombie computers," he said. "For instance, much of the spam sent from Korea's computers was attributed to innocent PCs, which had been turned into compromised zombies by spammers from other countries."
Mastoras added that computer users can protect themselves against becoming zombies by having up-to-date anti-virus software, firewalls and Microsoft security patches.
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