Consumer 'Email Insecurity' Documented

I was just perusing the EmailLabs “Intevation Report” and the "email insecurity factor" survey was interesting. Particularly, the statistic of 64% of respondents claiming that their permission/personal email often gets blocked or sent to their spam folder.

More than half of consumer email users use at least two email addresses, apparently to protect themselves from spam and cybercrime, according to an October 2007 survey by email reputation service Habeas and market research firm Ipsos that found what it called a high "email insecurity factor" among regular email users.

Among the findings:

·         73%: Survey participants who use email daily

·         62%: Concerned about becoming victims of fraud or cybercrime

·         60%: Say spam is becoming worse

·         83%: Say their email client's user interface has a spam button

·         23%: Say their email service has fraud detection

·         64%: Say permission/personal email regularly get routed to the spam folder or blocked

"Despite the popularity, ubiquity, cost-effectiveness and targeted nature of email, online relationships and the interactions that enable them are very fragile," said Habeas CEO Des Cahill. "If individuals, marketers, businesses and Web 2.0 communities cannot place their trust in email, the Internet's premier 'killer app' will not reach its full potential as these groups could refrain from using it for higher value interactions."