Guinea pigs answer all their spam for a month

Fifty volunteers from around the world spent an entire month answering every piece of junk mail and clicking on every browser pop-up. The result? Predictable, really, but like a car crash on the highway, it's hard not to rubberneck.

Conducted by anti-virus company McAfee, the S.P.A.M. (Spammed Persistently All Month) project issued 50 lucky (?) volunteers a Dell laptop (minus security software), an e-mail address, and the following directions: Click on every Viagra ad, reply to all Nigerian get-rich-quick scams, and fill in every form promising a free iPod.

Well, you can guess what happened—the more the volunteers answered junk e-mail, the more they got in return. And requesting to unsubscribe from a list only made matters worse, as one participant told Network World.

As a group, the test subjects received more than 104,800 junk e-mail messages during the month-long experiment, or nearly 2,100 a day.

Meanwhile, their Dell laptops (which became clogged with spyware) slowed to a crawl, no one got a free iPod, and those foolish enough to give out their home addresses wound up with mountains of junk mail on their doorsteps.

Other conclusions, according to McAfee: The U.S. still leads the world as the top producer of spam (Brazil and Italy are gunning it out for the No. 2 slot); most junk e-mail centers on financial scams (such as credit card offers and pre-approved loans), followed by heath/medicine offers and adult spam; and foreign-language spam is on the rise.

Does it all sound pretty obvious? Sure it does—but hey, judging from the 50-plus pieces of junk mail I get every day, it looks like plenty of goofballs are still clicking on those Viagra ads.

Click here to check out the blog entries of those who took part in the experiment, and check out McAfee's summary of test results, which the company released last week.

Related:
Diary of a deliberately spammed housewife [Network World]