Having invented email, and the Spam that it generates, you’d think the North Americans would be a bit more savvy. Surely they don’t regularly open spam emails?

Well apparently they do. A recent study by MAAWG found that 1 in 6 North American email users respond to spam. 45 per cent of respondents said they identified spam by the subject line, and the subject lines they are thinking of are probably familiar to all of us. But 16 per cent of respondents open email, duped by the clever Spammers and their clever subject lines.   

While this survey shows that North Americans are gullible, we are sure that future surveys will find similarly gullible email users in other nations.  The reason why we are gullible is that Spammers have perfected the “doesn’t look like spam” subject line.  The classic Spam subject lines in my Junk folder now are: “Enlarge your Manhood”; “Your E-banking account has been suspended”; “luxury Items”; “For Limited Time”;  “Awesome New Products”; “IMPORTANT: Alert for your billing information”.  Where Spammers have got clever is in imitating subject lines we receive from trusted correspondents: “Re:”, “FYI”, “I thought you might like this”, “Fw: funny”, “Hi there”.  The point is that Spammers are leveraging off the fact that most of us write terrible subject lines.

Steve Kimmens