Final Comments to the Federal Trade Commission on
Unsolicited Commercial Email
by EFF-Austin, EF-Florida, Voters Telecommunications Watch
June 12, 1997
Survey Overview
First and foremost, we wanted to gather some basic factual data about the state of the junk email issue. Anecdotal cost, volume, and technology information seemed lacking in the debate. In fact two of the FTC's questions seemed interested in the costs and technological solutions to the issue. It quickly became obvious that there was a dearth of basic knowledge about how much junk email costs individuals. In an issue where emotions and opinions run high, a lack of knowledge can be fatal.
The survey was begun in mid-April, right before Tax Day. At its height, the survey received over 300 responses per day. The survey was designed to take the respondent's answers and send them to the survey coordinator and the respondent in email form. The presence of email filtering technology available in Eudora 3.0[1] on the survey coordinator's laptop made this survey somewhat self-referential, as the problem of junk email is a subset of a larger problem of how to manage large amounts of incoming mail.
Over 2,700 people answered the user survey, and 60 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) answered the institutional survey. They are truly the heroes of this issue, as every one of them enriched all of our knowledge of the facts of this issue.
http://www.vtw.org/uce/report/FTC.html