A new study says you're not putting yourself in any major spam-swelling risk if you subscribe to e-mail newsletters, because most prominent online organizations honor e-mail privacy rights. That's the finding from Arial Software, who released its results July 14.
"From the results of this study we must conclude that email newsletter subscriptions are almost never the source of spam," said the report's author, Arial president Mike Adams, an anti-spam advocate whose work includes SpamAnatomy. Announcing the "2004 Email Subscription Spam Risk Audit," Adams said spam comes mostly from Web-based e-mail harvesting by software robots, not signups to e-mail newsletters or information alerts.
His report found that only three out of 1,057 online organizations reviewed sent "blatant spam while refusing to honor unsubscribe requests," with the other 99.6 percent of organizations honoring their e-mail privacy policies and refused to share e-mails with third parties.
But Adams's findings also showed two percent of the organizations reviewed ignored unsubscribe requests, and "a shocking" 51 percent did not include unsubscribe links at all – both violations of the CAN-SPAM law that took effect at the beginning of the year.
Still, Adams continued, those failures didn't affect the main finding: that spam among online organizations producing subscription e-mail newsletters and alerts is just about non-existent.
"Our conclusion," he said, "is that consumers can subscribe to e-mail newsletters with confidence that their information will not be shared."
