With the help of 50 volunteers worldwide, McAfee recently conducted an experiment to determine what the result of responding to each and every spam message would be. Though it's pretty easy to guess the outcome, some of the results were quite interesting. Here is a breakdown:
- Males receive 15 more spam messages per day than females.
- Clicking "unsubscribe" provide useless in most cases, and often resulted in increased levels of spam
- Providing mailing addresses when attempting to receive free brochures, eyeliner, or an iPod resulted in incredible amounts of junk-mail at the doorstep.
- 18% of all spam received by US volunteers came in the form of phishing attempts (bank scams, Nigerian scams, etc).
- US participants received 65% more spam than participants from any other country.
- In almost all cases, the most notable side-effect was PC slowdowns thanks to spyware, malware and so on.
Read the full article here.
