The Woes of Unsubscribing

Unsubscribing is a pain. It takes several clicks, and doesn’t always work. Unfortunately with the amount of spam everyone gets on a daily basis it’s become a necessary part of our lives.

What’s worse, some not-so-nice senders will realize you’re a real person and that you actually check your email – and they will put you on more spammy mailing lists.  It happens way more often than you think!

Scary Spam Statistics:

• Spam accounts for 14.5 billion emails a day world wide
• This is 45% of all emails (Many research companies believe this number is in fact higher)
• 90% of spam is in English, 96% a year ago, so I guess this means spam is getting more “international.”
• The US is by far the largest generator of spam email at 15%
• India comes in second at around 7%
• Advertising related spam accounts for 36% of all spam emails
• Adult related subject matters come in at second at 31%
• Only 2.5% of spam emails fall under the scam & fraud category
• The Radicati Research Group in Palo Alto found that spam costs businesses $20.5 billion annually
• Nucleus Research estimates approximately $1934 is lost per employee because of spam

You may be asking yourself what’s one to do? Well, there are several options. The first is to simply be very careful about handing out your email address, which means limiting the news letters and promotions you signup for, and the services and membership sites you join. Limiting your email’s exposure is the first step in reducing the amount of spam you receive.

There are also several services that enable a quick and safe way for people to unsubscribe and prevent undesired emails from entering their inbox. SaneBox is one of those services, their BlackHole feature allows users to stop unwanted emails from bothering them (it won’t unsubscribe you, but all future emails will go straight to trash). Whether you utilize existing services or tools to manage spam or simply change your email habits, it’s important to do something. Processing spam is a huge time suck and kills productivity, do something before you’re neck deep in it!

 

References:

http://www.spamlaws.com/, https://www.trustwave.com