The Internet has allowed obnoxious people new ways to annoy the rest of us.

One way that makes over 90% of surveyed Internet users mad is junk email, according to a new study by World Research. The San Jose, Calif., market research firm surveyed more than 1,000 netizens about their feelings on these unsolicited email advertisements. And respondents were not happy.

The majority, two-thirds of all respondents, favor regulation of email to prevent the mass mailing of commercial email, spamming, as it's known colloquially.

About the same percentage of the respondents rated spam as "not useful at all" and "bothersome" or worse. Less than 7 percent said they "find it useful."

Junk mail is more than just annoying. If we remember last year's trouble that Philadelphia-based CyberPromotions, the best known spammer, caused America Online. The excess spam email crippled AOL's servers and caused almost two days of outages.

"Email users are also upset because they actually pay to receive (download) the commercial messages," said Dave Murphy, President of Damar Group, Ltd. "And most users don't know how to turn on 'twit filters' to automatically transfer spam messages into their trash mailbox," Murphy said in a recent magazine interview.

The AOL incident landed CyberPromotions in court, but that was only one of the related court cases the Philadelphia spammer is facing. It has consistently used free speech arguments to defend its actions. That was enough to convince a Los Angeles judge, who recently rejected a similar injunction against Cyber Promotions brought by Earthlink, a large Southern California ISP.

Meanwhile, Cyber Promotions has released a software package called Cyber Bomber. The company said it allows one person with a 28.8 modem to send 150,000 e-mails an hour.

Legal issues are still undecided, and only time will tell what the final outcome will be. But based on email Damar Group, Ltd. has received and comments in our message center, http://dgl.com/msg/, it looks like most of us don't want spam.

For more information on preventing spam, visit our anti-spam site at http://dgl.com/docs/antispam.html.

Leave your comments in our message center, http://dgl.com/msg/.

Damar Group, Ltd. helps business use technology.

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ITINFO is an electronic publication of Damar Group, Ltd., publisher of Training Express computer learning guides. Comments and submissions to info@dgl.com.

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updated April 27, 1997
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