“Business people prefer e-mail communication,” according to a survey by Matt Cain, META Group, an expert on e-mail and collaboration strategies. Although more than half of all adults in the 35 largest U.S. markets have a cell phone, some of the reasons cited for preferring e-mail for business are:

• Response flexibility
  
• Can communicate with multiple parties easily
  
• Paper trail is created
  
• Can communicate more quickly
  
• More productive
  
• More targeted, less socializing

The biggest down side to e-mail is that spam (unsolicited junk e-mail sent in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it) has reached a critical level. It used to be that the spam problem was mostly confined to personal mail accounts with major free providers, like Hotmail and Yahoo!, but it has become a serious problem for corporate accounts, too. Spam cost corporate America $9 billion in 2002, and it is estimated that spam will make up to 40 percent of all e-mail in 2003, according to Ferris Research, a San Francisco-based market research company. This adds up to considerable lost productivity, particularly when accidentally deleted e-mails are taken into account, not to mention the increased user frustration level.

The major ISPs (Internet Service Providers, e.g. AOL, MSN, Earthlink, etc.) are all scrambling to come up with an effective way to combat the spam problem, and it appears there just is no easy or quick resolve. In fighting spam, there are four approaches: educating users; establishing industry standards; legislation; and technological fixes. Of the four, technology, at this point, offers the best defense.

The web site: http://spam.abuse.net/ has information on how to protect yourself and help stop spam, and there are many good, free anti-spam programs that can be downloaded, such as SpamNet from http://www.cloudmark.com/. Let's all do our part to help preserve the Internet's integrity.

Source: Excerpts from Cyber Atlas