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July 08, 2004
42% of Small Businesses Consider Dropping Email
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Despite all the headshaking by the cognoscenti at the recent Supernova about my "Just Say 'No' To Email" stance (see earlier piece), today's USA Today has a story about the extreme lengths that businesses are considering as a result of spam. And a lot of businesses are willing to consider giving up email altogether, according to a Symantec survey conducted last December:
[from
Symantec Survey Finds Small Businesses Fed Up with Spam, Willing to Take Action]
The survey found that small businesses are seeing a noticeable increase in spam in their inboxes. More than half (64 percent) of respondents reported an increase in spam over the past six months, with 33 percent noting dramatic increases. Nearly 40 percent of respondents said that spam made up more than half of the email coming into their businesses.
Small businesses are also willing to take steps to reduce their exposure to spam should the problem continue, according to the survey. For example, 42 percent of small businesses said they would consider abandoning email for business correspondence if the spam situation worsened. [Emphasis mine] Fifty-five percent reportedly would consider changing their company email addresses to stop spam. Moreover, 56 percent would consider locking down their email server to allow only approved messages, which would also force all users who wanted to correspond with the company via email to go through an approval process first. Thirty-two percent of respondents already invest the time and resources to help curb spam by submitting spam email addresses to blacklist companies.
If we lock down the openness of email -- which is one of its purported benefits -- and switch over to a registration model, we are in essence creating a gated community model -- which is what IM already offers.
I say that we should just be like the teenagers, and switch to IM.
Comments (5)
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1. Peter Caputa on July 8, 2004 08:54 AM writes...
bandwagons getting old.
Permalink to Comment2. Stowe Boyd on July 8, 2004 09:09 AM writes...
When your friends start turning on you, you know things are going screwy in the world.
Permalink to Comment3. Jennifer Filipowski on July 8, 2004 09:55 AM writes...
Amen to that! IM is faster and more effective than blogging. However, there are a couple big issue that businesses face in considering the use of IM. They will soon realize that the free ones out there (eg. AOL, Yahoo! And MSN) just aren’t going to cut it.
The first reason is that the free clients are completely insecure. TechWeb has posted a few articles on how quickly IM worms could spread. It is an eventuality that a senior researcher with Symantec's security response team said would make the quick-spreading Sasser worm look like a worn-out snail. In addition, businesses have already been dealing with SPIM, the IM equivalent of SPAM.
Free IMs also pose issues in relation to corporate compliance laws since the information exchanged over public clients is not inherently saved by the client or end-user and thus neither archivable nor searchable. A company is also risking losing a lot of intellectual property since once the chat window is closed, the conversation and anything that transpired between the chat participants is gone.
Enterprise-class, secure chat and instant messaging products have the potential to gain a lot of momentum.
Permalink to Comment4. Rick Gregory on July 8, 2004 10:59 AM writes...
"42 percent of small businesses said they would consider abandoning email for business correspondence if the spam situation worsened."
But does this mean that they'd switch to an alternative (RSS feeds/collborative environments/IM) or simply look to move backwards, out of the digital world and to fax/phone? The problem I have with email isn't the spam that hits my inbox (spambayes kills that nicely with essentially zero false positives), it's that the aggressive filtering on other systems erodes my confidence that my messages to others are being seen.
Permalink to Comment5. Stowe Boyd on July 8, 2004 11:08 AM writes...
As far as I can tell, the survey did not distinguish these various alternatives.
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