July 4, 2008

The Spam experiment

McAfee the computer security firm have been conducting an experiment, firstly they needed fifty volunteers who would be given a free computer and the user were to see how much spam they received, but to make it worse they had to reply to the spam messages to see what would happen.

Although the results are due out next week, there are some basics coming out. Apparently each user received an average of seventy spam emails, but men it seemed are likely to up to fifteen more probably due to certain tablets that are available.

The experiment lasted a month and there were five users from ten countries involved, but the highest spammed were the Americans, they received over the course of the month 23,233 messages, while the UK participants received around 10,000.

One thing that they all noticed was that their computers had slowed down considerably.

Source [Network World]