Tel-Chai Nation

According to the AP, people are now accepting spam as a way of life:

NEW YORK (AP) - Spam messages are increasingly plaguing e-mail inboxes, but more Americans are accepting them as a fact of life, a new study finds.

Thirty-seven percent of U.S. e-mail users say they are getting more junk in their personal e-mail accounts, and 29 percent see an increase in their work accounts. About half say they have not noticed a change, the Pew Internet and American Life Project said in its study, released Wednesday.

Meanwhile, 28 percent of Internet users now say that spam is not a problem at all, up from 16 percent in June 2003.

"It's maybe starting to become part of life online," said Susannah Fox, associate director with Pew. "Once something's part of life online, people feel that they should just stop complaining about it and move on, even though people are still annoyed by it."

Pew said that spam with pornography - the type users are most likely to complain about - appears to be dropping in relation to pitches for drugs and financial opportunities as well as scams for sensitive data like passwords.

People have also gotten smarter about blocking spam with software filters and using techniques for making their e-mail addresses more difficult for spammers to find.

The telephone survey of 1,492 U.S. adult Internet users, conducted Feb. 15 to March 7, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

As someone who's been getting plenty of crap in his own inbox, I don't think that it should be tolerated, and that those getting it should protest. This report also makes it sound as if pornography were more of a problem than phishing scams are, when the opposite would hold more true.

I know that there are supposed to be some special places to where you can forward spam to, and perhaps even the IP address of the spam you get, and that's what people should be doing. Phishing scams in particular shouldn't have to be put up with.