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Pew Internet Project Releases New Spam Report

The volume of spam is growing in Americans' personal and workplace e-mail accounts, but e-mail users are less bothered by it.

Spam continues to plague the Internet as more Americans than ever say they are getting more spam than in the past. But while American Internet users report increasing volumes of spam, they also indicate that they are less bothered by it than before. According to a new report by the Pew Internet Project, users have become more sophisticated about dealing with spam.

Fully 71 percent of e-mail users use filters offered by their e-mail provider or employer to block spam. Users also report less exposure to pornographic spam, which to many people is the most offensive type of unsolicited e-mail. Spam has not become a significant deterrent to the use of e-mail, as some observers speculated it might when unsolicited e-mail first began flooding users' inboxes several years ago. But it continues to degrade the integrity of e-mail.

Some 55 percent of e-mail users say they have lost trust in e-mail because of spam.

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