Celebrating A Decline In Spam

Finally we may be seeing the end of email spam…
Spam has long been an unavoidable part of being on the internet. Whether it’s in the form of emails from questionable businessmen who claim to be our long-lost brother with a trust fund (just send some cash over to prove yourself) or legitimate emails from businesses we may have supported once but never actually signed up for an email list, our inboxes have always been filled with clutter we would rather not have.
However, while many of us have probably given up on the idea of claiming our inboxes back as our own, there are signs that the era of spam is coming to a close.
When email first started as an in-business messaging system, there was far less noise in our inboxes than there is now. But as we’ve come to rely on email for just about everything, the interruptive nature of spam has become more and more irritating and, at times, debilitating to our workflow, productivity and brain space. Because of that, there have been many steps to combat spam that seem to be working. It’s said that 2008 was the year of “peak spam”, when the share of spam in total email traffic was the greatest. However in 2015, it has declined to just over 50% according to cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab, which means that roughly half of all emails being sent into the ether are indeed legitimate.
So what has helped bring the era of spam to a gradual close?
First, there’s been help from lawmakers. Laws including the US CAN-SPAM Act and the UK Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations have made it so that spammers must remove recipients from their mailing list if they so request—via one of those minuscule “unsubscribe me” links you’ll find at the end of every email—and impose harsh penalties for a failure to comply. Though it’s certainly time consuming, frustrated recipients can now manually remove everything from their inbox that shouldn’t be there. While it’s not a perfect method, it does at least work in most cases. In addition, spam filters have become more and more adept at finding emails that are pure garbage or completely illegitimate, so much of the spam we’re being sent may reach our inbox, but it never reaches our eyesight—a huge relief for our bloated inboxes.
But perhaps the most significant reason that spam is on the decline is the savviness of internet users themselves.
Everything from cheap and crude scams (send me money via Western Union) to more sophisticated honeytraps (open this attachment from your mail server) are becoming more and more obvious to users who have been on the internet now for over a decade. Because fewer people fall for these malicious email campaigns, those who send them get a lower return on investment for their time and money, which works to disincentivize the scams themselves.
In addition, even for businesses that are sending out newsletters to legitimate subscribers or one-time supporters, the efficacy of adding their message to the noise of someone’s inbox is declining. This is a reflection of the fact that the era of “interruptive marketing” is dead. We don’t want to be told what to look at or interrupted while we’re reading our work emails simply because we have so many other ways to keep in touch with the things that interest us. For example, instead of receiving a weekly newsletter from our yoga studio, we can follow them on Twitter or RSS or Facebook, so we will passively see their updates at a time when we’re not trying to focus on work or responding to urgent emails. As businesses figure out what modes of engagement are most effective, they are quickly finding that the era of interruptive spam is coming to a close.
If you’re looking to keep your inbox clutter to a minimum, check out this blog post to find out about chasing a state of inbox zero.