Americans are getting more junk e-mail than ever before, but seem less bothered by it, according to a study published Wednesday.
Thirty-seven per cent of e-mail users said junk e-mail, or spam, had increased in their personal e-mail accounts, up from 28 per cent of users who said the same thing two years ago, according to the latest figures of the Pew Internet American Life Project published Wednesday.
Spam was also infecting work e-mail accounts as well, the study found, with 29 per cent of respondents reporting more spam than usual, up from 21 per cent two years ago.
But the study suggests the respondents are more capable of dealing with the incoming messages than before and see them as less of a bother.
Respondents were less likely to consider spam "a big problem" and more likely to say it was "not a problem at all" than they were in 2003, the study found.
The study suggested computer users were becoming savvier in dealing with the spam and can recognize it more quickly.
The results of the study come a day after an internet standards body gave preliminary approval to a security technology designed to detect and block fake e-mail messages, which its backers hope will help reduce the growing glut of online spam and fraudulent e-mail.
The Internet Engineering Task Force adopted the draft standard of the technology, called DomainKeys Identified Mail, or DKIM, which is backed by a group of technology companies including Yahoo Inc., Cisco Systems Inc.
and Sendmail.org.
The technology works by letting internet servers add an extra layer of message authentication to outgoing e-mails.
When another server receives the e-mail, it can check to see if the message includes the proper encrypted key from the original server. If the e-mail doesn't have the proper authentication, then a server won't be able to verify the original source of the e-mail.
The technology is designed to counter spam, particularly spam used in phishing scams, where e-mails directing computer users to infected websites are often disguised to appear as if they come from other, more trusted sources.
E-mail filters currently in widespread use either read characters in the e-mail looking for common words found in spam or they rely on blacklists of known spammers.
The approval from the IETF gives the technology a leg-up over Microsoft's Sender ID, a similar technology that provides its own digital authentication key but has yet to be approved.
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