Yesterday I was listening to a talk show in the radio, and one guy was talking about Facebook Messages, their new email/messaging system. At one point the show host said something like this:
Let’s hope this new system will solve the spam problem. I believe that over 90% of the email messages people receive right now are spam, right?
And the “tech expert” went like this:
Oh yeah spam is a big problem, and yes filtering through all the spam we receive is one of the biggest challenges right now.
When I heard that I thought to myself: “You gotta be kidding!”.
I agree with the person with the fact that 90% of the email messages flowing around are spam, but filtering them is not a challenge anymore, as Gmail and other clients solved it years ago.
I am not sure about you, but I get almost zero spam on my inbox. If I was to count I guess it would come to 3 or 4 spam messages making it to my inbox every month, which I consider to be a negligible problem (especially because I receive around 3,000 emails per month, so the percentage of spam messages over the total would be 0.1%).
And I don’t use any fancy tactics or software (e.g., spamarrest). I just use a Gmail account, and sometimes I even use my email around the web (e.g., to sign-up for online services, newsletters and the like).
So I don’t get why people complain so much about spam. As long as you use Gmail or another decent client your inbox should be pretty clean. But hey, that is my opinion, and want to hear from you guys. That is why I created a poll, and you can also leave a comment below to expand your thoughts.
Remark: Keep in mind that the definition of spam is an unsolicited message. If you receive messages from services and newsletters you subscribed to (e.g., YouTube, an online store or the marketer who wanted your email address to show you a video), that is not spam. Sure those messages can be equally annoying, but they are not spam technically, so please don’t consider those when answering the poll.
Daniel Scocco is a programmer and entrepreneur located in São Paulo, Brazil. His first company, Online Profits, builds and manages websites in different niches. His second company, Kubic, specializes in developing mobile apps for the iOS and Android platforms.
