Lasting love

Citation

(2001), "Lasting love", Work Study, Vol. 50 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ws.2001.07950eab.004

Lasting love

Lasting love

Last year's Lovebug computer virus – arriving as an apparently innocuous e-mail with the subject title "ILOVEYOU" from a recognised sender – caused damage to businesses estimated at more than $7 billion. Yet, despite all the publicity, well over a third (37 percent) of business e-mail users across the UK say they would still be inclined to open such an e-mail if it arrived in their mailbox. That is just one of the stark statistics revealed by a survey conducted for Message Labs by research specialists IDC. Their report also confirms that users would open an e-mail appearing to be from someone they knew if the following appeared in the subject line: great joke (54 percent), look at this (50 percent), message (46 percent), no title (40 percent) or special offer (39 percent). An unsurprising 71 percent of those surveyed believe that e-mail is now a business critical tool and more than half of them (57 percent) are now sending non-business related e-mail from work. Interesting too that, of the 65 percent of respondents who had anti-virus software and who were personally responsible for updating it, nearly half of them (44 percent) left it longer than a month to do so.