Blogging will probably be light next week. Steve and I are both headed to MAAWG SF. Steve will be presenting training on Monday and at one of the later sessions, too. I managed to get out of having to work this conference, so no presenting for me.
We’re both looking forward to seeing everyone. Drop by and say hi.
I am still catching up from being away at MAAWG last week, and have not had much time to blog or even follow other blogs enough to link to what people are saying.
I would encourage those of you who are not MAAWG members to consider joining the organization. MAAWG has been working hard on putting together sender training courses. I gave part of one of them. I also attended all the other training sessions and learned quite a bit from those sessions as well.
MAAWG, as its name suggests, is a working group. There are opportunities for everyone to teach, participate and learn. The next meeting, is in San Francisco next February.
Twitter and some of the other delivery blogs are all abuzz today talking about the consumer survey released by MAAWG (pdf link, large file) looking at end user knowledge and awareness of email security practices.
The survey has a lot of good data and I strongly encourage people to look at the full report. There are a couple of results that are generating most of the buzz, including the fact that nearly half of the respondents have clicked on a link or replied to a spam email. Additionally, 17% of respondents said they made a mistake when they clicked on the link.
The magic statistic, though, is that 12% of the respondents said that they responded to spam because they were interested in the products or services offered in the spam. This, right there, is one of the major reasons why spam continues and is a growing problem. Out of 800 people surveyed, almost 100 of them were interested enough in the products sold by spam to respond positively. There are roughly 1.6 billion people on the Internet, which gives spammers a market of 200 million people for their spam.
Other studies have seen similar responses, that is consumers do respond to spam. Most surveys don’t define spam, however, and given a lot of consumers call “mail I don’t like” or “all commercial email” as spam it’s hard to know what the respondents are responding too. In some studies, some respondents even defined mail from companies that they had given their email address to, but had not explicitly asked for email from as spam. In this study MAAWG did request how the respondent defined spam. Of the respondents, 60% say spam is mail they did not solicit, and 41% say spam is mail that ends up in the spam folder. Given that 60% of respondents define spam as “unsolicited email” it is possible that some people are responding to mail they never requested.
Sad news for those of us who were hoping that lack of consumer response would make spamming unprofitable enough that spammers would stop.
The crosstab between “how do you define spam” and “how do you react to spam” may be an interesting data set to see.
Ever have that day? That day full of delivery problems, ISP problems, headaches and turmoil? That week where you want to just forget email ever existed? Ever have that day extend for a week?
So have we all. In honor of that kind of day, we introduce the “No email ’till Monday”.
Fill a shaker with ice. Then add:
6 fl ounces light rum
4 fl ounces pineapple juice
2 fl ounces cointreau
heavy dash blood orange bitters.
Shake. Pour into 2 cocktail glasses and garnish with a pineapple slice.
Serves 2 (or one if it’s been a really *really* bad week)
We have made this with both light rum and pineapple flavored rum. The pineapple lends a sweeter taste to the drink, but there is a nice burnt sugar edge to the drink with the straight light rum.
I’m headed out on Monday to Amsterdam for a family wedding and MAAWG so blogging will be light for the next 2 weeks. I have some posts stacked up and the people I meet and talk with at MAAWG always trigger new thoughts about email, delivery and spam so do check back while I’m gone.
Those of you who are going to be at MAAWG be sure to stop by my session on Wednesday afternoon and add your perspective to the discussion.