Public Opinion About the Internet and Information Technologies - E-mail

As noted earlier, e-mail is the most popular application on the Internet. More than nine out of ten (97%) e-mail users felt that e-mail had made their lives better, according to a Gallup poll survey taken in June 2001. The data, which appeared in "Almost All E-mail Users Say Internet, E-mail Have Made Lives Better" by Jeffrey Jones (Gallup Organization, July 23, 2001), also revealed that 52% of e-mailers agreed that e-mail was the online activity that they engaged in most. Over 50% said that they had come to use e-mail more often than the telephone or the U.S. mail. Most e-mailers, however, would give up e-mail before they would give up more traditional means of communication. When asked which form of communication they would be least likely to sacrifice, 63% said the telephone, 15% said U.S. mail, 12% said e-mail, and 10% said cellular phones.

Slightly more e-mail users reported using e-mail at home as opposed to work (90% vs. 83%), and roughly half (53%) used e-mail in both places. Most people had more than one e-mail address, which is likely not only due to work and home accounts but to the proliferation of spam as well. In fact, only 23% of e-mailers had one address. Thirty-three percent had two addresses, 14% had three addresses, 7% had four addresses, and a full 22% claimed to have five or more e-mail addresses. People who used e-mail at work sent and received e-mails much more than those who just used e-mail at home. Fifty-one percent of people who said they had e-mail at work also said they check it once an hour, whereas only 6% of those with home accounts checked in on their e-mail every hour. This may have to do with the volume of e-mails received at home and at work. The average e-mail user with a work account reported receiving twelve e-mails per day. The median home user only received eight. As to who people sent and received messages from, the June 2001 Gallup survey revealed that 39% of people traded e-mails with coworkers and business associates most. Family came in second with 33%, and 28% replied that they e-mailed friends most often. For the most part, men were more likely to e-mail a business associate than women were (44% vs. 32%), and women were more likely to e-mail family than men were (38% vs. 29%).

Overall in 2001, women tended to use e-mail more than men did, according to Jones in "Almost All E-mail Users Say Internet, E-mail Have Made Lives Better." Nearly two-thirds (61%) of females who used e-mail said e-mailing was the activity they engaged in the most online. Fewer than half (44%) of male e-mailers cited emailing as their number one activity. Oddly, women were more likely than men to be willing to give up e-mail. Fifteen percent of men responded that they were less willing to give up their e-mail rather than other forms of communication, as opposed to 8% of women. Other than these slight gender differences in e-mail use, very few demo-graphic differences existed among the general population of e-mailers. As to instant messaging, most adults (58%) said they never used it online. Only one-third of adults reported using IM occasionally.

Spam

As anyone who uses e-mail knows, spam continues to be a growing problem. According to "American E-mailers Increasingly Fed up with Computer Spam" by Frank Newport and Joseph Carroll (Gallup Organization, May 20, 2003), Earthlink estimated that nearly 40% of the e-mail coursing through its system each day consisted of spam in 2003. America Online (AOL) claimed that up to 80% of the e-mail in its network was spam. USA Today calculated that two trillion spam messages were likely to have been sent over all of 2003.

Most Americans were not happy with the amount of spam they were receiving. An April 2003 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll revealed that 67% of e-mail users reported that spam was a problem. This was a sharp increase from March 2000 when a Pew/Internet poll reported that only 37% of people said they received too much spam. In fact, the problem was so bad that 13% had quit their e-mail service in the year prior to the April 2003 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll. Nearly one-quarter (24%) of e-mail users had considered leaving their service because of spam.