Would you like to lose
weight fast? Would you like to make $5,000 a month for your home? Yes or no, you
are more likely to find such unsolicited offers flooding your E-mall inbox these
days than ever before, along with a free trial for professional teeth whitening
and a low-rate mortgage. Such E-mail, best known by its
pejorative appellation, Spam, has been annoying Internet users for years. But in
the last three months, Spam has been spiked. Spare-watchers
attribute the escalation to a combination of factors. In a
slumping economy, companies going out of business may be selling their lists of
customer E-mail addresses to pay off creditors. Mailing tactics
have also improved. Online marketers have always selected addresses from Web
sites, but with the growth of sites like eBay, the online auction service where
thousands of people post their E-mail addresses, automated sweeps of the World
Wide Web for E-mail addresses are obtaining more results. Many
now use "dictionary attacks," in which a computer automatically matches
combinations of thousands of common, words and names with long lists of large
domain names (amyfritz@ yahoo. com, amyfritz@ hotmail, com and so on) sends
E-mail messages to all of them, much like telemarketers dialing numbers in
sequence. As a result, even people who have made efforts to keep their E-mail
addresses private are finding their mailboxes stuffed with suggestions on how to
make money fast or reduce their debts simply and easily.
Marketers worry that people who feel constantly assaulted by junk E-mail are
less likely to trust any commercial communication by E-mails, even from
businesses they might otherwise be happy to hear from, like a retailer alerting
them to a sale on an item they are interested in. To shield themselves from junk
E-mail, many Internet users have become increasingly wary of divulging their
addresses. Some mainstream marketers are already beginning to
see the effects of resistance to junk E-mail. Only a year ago, advertisers were
raving about the response rates to targeted E-mail, which could reach as high as
20 percent. But that number is falling fast. Still, critics say
some online retailers with well-known brand names also contribute to the problem
by automatically adding customers to an E-mail list unless they specifically ask
to be kept off. United Airlines, Amazon. com and Martha
Stewart. com, among others, all require customers to uncheck the "yes" box on
their Web site that asks if they would like to receive E-mail from them-or, in
some cases, an unspecified list of advertising "partners". Some times, it is not
entirely clear that there is a choice involved. The difficulty
of defining Spare is one-reason efforts to pass federal legislation to stop it
have foundered. Critics have compared junk E-mail to unsolicited faxes, which
are illegal under a law that was passed when receiving a fax was quite
expensive.
单选题
The damage done by Spare to businesses can be shown in ______.
A. the distrust of customers in commercial communication by E-mail
B. the interest of customers in E-mails alerting them to sales
C. the happiness of customers in giving out their addresses
D. the reluctance of customers to use the Internet
【正确答案】
A
【答案解析】[解析] 见第七段：商家担心人们会因为时常被垃圾邮件骚扰而不再相信任何商业邮件。
单选题
Well-known online retailers, which contribute to the Spam problem by
automatically adding customers to an E-mail list unless they specifically ask to
be kept off, include ______ in the passage.