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 will find 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. corn, 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 Spam 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 Spam 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：商家担心顾客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, including ______.