Spam driving human email evolution

The deluge of spam flooding email inboxes is changing the way we use emails and the way we interact via the medium, according to an analyst group that has explored the effect of spam on legitimate mailshots - such as email newsletters.

Jakob Nielsen, founder of Nielsen Norman Group, who has published the findings, claims companies have now found ways to design newsletters to prevent them being tagged as spam. Others have built strong relationships with ISPs to ensure their message is getting through.

Nielsen also claims users are now becoming far cleverer and far more brutal when it comes to sorting the wheat from the chaff.

"Email newsletters are no longer at war with spam, as we observed two years ago. Today, users know spam and can identify the qualities of well-designed email newsletters," said Nielsen in a statement.

However, the proliferation of spam means people are far quicker to hit 'delete' if an email doesn't instantly grab their attention. The message is clear - life's too short to read bad emails, even if they are legitimately sent.

"The bad news is that poorly designed or ineffective newsletters that fail to keep the interest of users risk getting blacklisted and possibly prevented from being delivered to other subscribers," he added.

One of the UK's largest distributors of email newsletters is lastminute.com, which sends its regular HTML email to around 2.8 million subscribers in the UK and a staggering eight million worldwide.

As such the company works extensively to ensure its email gets through to as many users as possible.

A spokeswoman for lastminute.com said: "It's in our best interests to make sure the email is getting through and not being flagged as spam. As such we operate a very strict opt-in policy and we believe wholeheartedly in the responsible use of email."

The spokeswoman confirmed that lastminute.com has in place agreements with major ISPs such as AOL and Yahoo! to ensure its email gets through to as many subscribers as possible. However, she conceded individuals and small ISPs, or companies with mail filters, may still accidentally or wrongly block emails - a fact which goes with the territory for all companies sending email newsletters.