Employees perception and coping mechanism of spam email

Abstract

The Internet becomes more accessible from anywhere in the world with the existence of various type of Internet connection such as Wi-Fi and broadband. At the same time this situation has encouraged spamming activities to become more active as well. Nowadays, most of email users are always distracted by the unwanted messages in their inbox. They never asked for these email and often do not know the sender and its mysterious how they got an email address from. It seems email infrastructure is widely used, as well as misused as an efficient medium in electronic communication. In Malaysia, the number of internet user is increasing every year due to the increasing number of broadband subscribers every year. The popularity of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter make the Internet livelier and the spammer more active. However most of the researchers focused on the technology and legislation to control spam and very scarce literature reports on other aspects. From the literature, by depends on the technology only is insufficient to ensure security and recently more researchers have started to change the direction to the human aspect security. Thus, this study aims to investigate how Malaysian employees manage their spam email based on the developed framework. In this study, six factors have been identified namely; perceived severity, perceived susceptible, self-efficacy, anti-spam, ethics and policy that influenced the coping mechanisms. The study adopted a quantitative approach and used the survey method for data collection. A total of 487 responses were collected based on 700 questionnaires distributed to employees of selected Malaysia organizations. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the 412 useful responses. The findings indicate that the use of anti-spam software, self-efficacy, and ethics have significant influence on how the employees handle the spam problem, whether they adopted problem-focused coping mechanism or emotion-focused coping mechanism. The study contributes towards understanding how employees deal with spam emails which can assist the management to devise proper policies to improve the productivity of the staff.