HERE was a time when e-mail was hailed as the killer app of the Internet, the medium that would change the way people communicate. E-mail would not simply liberate the world from telephone tag; it would flatten hierarchies, embolden the socially challenged, reshape human interaction.
But that was before spammers hijacked the world's In boxes. Now most e-mail users are inundated with unsolicited electronic junk mail; were future anthropologists to look through them, they might conclude that this was a civilization obsessed with reproductive anatomy, mortgage rates and prescription drugs.
For many people, spam is more than a mundane annoyance. It is a pestilence changing their online experience, and decidedly not for the better.
According to a report to be released today by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a nonprofit research organization in Washington, 70 percent of e-mail users say that spam had made being online annoying or unpleasant.
One-third of e-mail users worry that spam is hindering legitimate communication because e-mail from co-workers, friends and relatives is getting lost, according to the report, based on a June telephone survey of 2,200 adults nationwide, of whom 1,300 use e-mail. Half of e-mail users said that spam had made them less trusting of e-mail in general. And surprisingly, perhaps, given what electronic communication was supposed to become, one-quarter said they had reduced their use of e-mail because of spam.
"The ever-increasing flood of spam is causing consumers to turn away from e-mail as a means of communication," said John Breyault, a research associate at the Telecommunications Research and Action Center, a nonprofit group in Washington that supplemented the Pew survey with some 4,000 anecdotes it had gathered at its Web site (www.banthespam.org) from frustrated e-mail users. "Many people we hear from are contemplating getting off the Internet altogether."
Daleena Garrelts has not abandoned the Web, but she has curtailed her use of e-mail. These days, Ms. Garrelts, 32, a human resources representative at a software firm in Cupertino, Calif., is far more willing to give out her cellphone number than her e-mail address.
"Two years ago, it would have been quite the opposite," she said in an interview. "I really discourage people from sending me general e-mail these days." If Ms. Garrelts needs to communicate with someone, she is more likely than before to pick up the telephone.
Other people, unwilling to reduce their use of e-mail but frustrated by the seeming inability of government, industry or anyone else to do much about spam, are taking matters into their own hands. They are vigilantes fighting a personal war: filtering e-mail, reporting each piece of spam they receive, changing their addresses or setting up temporary, disposable e-mail accounts to stay one step ahead of spammers. Combined with the thankless task of deleting one piece of junk mail after another, the result is a lot of time and effort spent coping with spam.
Yet according to the Pew study, many e-mail users (some 93 percent of adult American Internet users, or about 117 million people, use e-mail) feel trapped in a world of their own making. Many people have become so reliant on e-mail that they are not willing to change their address and start from scratch, for fear of missing the occasional important message.
"This translates into an issue of reliability," said Deborah Fallows, a senior research fellow at the Pew Internet and American Life Project and the author of the 33-page report, "Spam: How It Is Hurting E-Mail and Degrading Life on the Internet," that accompanies the survey.
"They worry that incoming important e-mail will get blocked by their filters or just plain lost in the morass and clutter of spam that gets into their In boxes," Dr. Fallows said.
In the Pew survey, which has a margin of sampling error of 3 percentage points and will be available at www.pewinternet.org, pornographic content topped all other categories of unwanted messages as the most bothersome, with three-quarters of the survey sample, especially women and parents, saying they were bothered by offensive or obscene e-mail. Some said it made their experience on the Internet miserable, according to the study.
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