Email Users Have Broad Definition of Spam

A new survey finds consumer have a broad perception of "spam," including email they simply don't find interesting.

A new survey on email habits conducted by Q Intereactive and MarketingSherpa finds that many email users have a very broad definition of what constitutes email spam—it might not just be unsolicited offers for (ahem) goods and services, but also include email messages they’ve chosen to receive, and even email subscriptions they simply don’t find interesting. As a result, many email users are using “report spam” features offered by many email providers to report messages as spam, even if they elected to receive them.

“What this survey uncovered is a major disconnect in consumers’ understanding and use of the ‘report spam’ button,” said Q Interactive president and CEO Matt Wise, “as well as consumers’ definition of spam from ‘I didn’t sign up for it’ to ‘I don’t like it’—all of which signal that the current system of email spam filtering is a broken process.”

According to the survey results, 56 percent of the respondents consider marketing messages from known sender to be spam if the particular message is “just not interesting to me.” Fully half of the respondents consider companies to be spammers if they receive email from them too frequently, and 31 percent consider mail from known senders to be spam if the messages “were once useful but aren’t relevant anymore.”

When reporting messages as spam, almost half of the survey respondents (48 percent) said they cite reasons other than “did not sign up for email” as a reason for reporting a particular message as spam. Respondents also indicated some confusion about how spam reporting works: 43 percent of respondents said they use a spam reporting feature rather than using a mailing’s unsubscribe links, and 21 percent of respondents said they’d use a spam reporting feature to unsubscribe from a mailing list regardless of whether they thought it was spam.

Furthermore, 56 percent thought reporting a message as spam would block all mai from that particular sender, while 47 percent believed it would automatically unsubscribe them from a mailing list. Some 21 percent of respondents thought a “report spam” feature would let the sender know they didn’t like the message, so the sender could “do a better job mailing me” in the future.

“Spam complaints are the primary metric that ISPs use to determine email delivery. This study shows that consumers don’t really understand how the complaint system works and that mailers don’t understand how consumers define spam,” said MarketingSherpa’s research director Stefan Tornquist, in a statement.