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Junk email on the rise for 2002

alledanalledan Member Posts: 19,541
edited December 2001 in General Discussion
SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- If your e-mail box is already besieged by unwanted salutations and solicitations, brace yourself -- the onslaught is about to get worse. Driven in part by anthrax scares, analysts say, e-mail volume will likely grow 45 percent next year, up from recent annual growth rates of 40 percent. A lot of it is junk. How to get out from under the electronic onslaught? Most e-mail programs -- Microsoft's Outlook and Netscape's Messenger among them -- include custom filtering features that most people don't use. While that's a start, smarter and heavier duty e-mail management tools are also available from a handful of technology start-ups. Some are designed to ward off one of the Internet's biggest nuisances -- the slew of marketing pitches commonly known as "spam." Others promise to help people focus on the e-mail they consider truly important. "E-mail is the most popular application on the Internet, but it's the No. 1 frustration as well," said Tonny Yu, chief executive of Mailshell, which provides a service akin to Caller ID for e-mail. Much of next year's e-mail volume is expected to be generated by direct-marketing companies. And that means "even more time is going to be sucked away" from people's lives dealing with spam, says Joyce Graff, an e-mail analyst for the Gartner Group technology research firm. By some estimates, workers with e-mail accounts spend an estimated one hour per shift dealing with their incoming messages.

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