According to McAfee, who selected five participants from each of 10 countries for the S.P.A.M. experiment, the five US participants received the most spam: 23,233 messages over the course of the month.

Brazil and Italy were in the 15,000-plus category, and Mexico and United Kingdom above 10,000. Australia, The Netherlands and Spain were in the 5000 to 9000-plus spam range. The S.P.A.M. volunteers in France and Germany got the least, less than 3,000 for the month. McAfee didn't even include what it calls "grey mail" (e-mail that arrived after participants signed up for a newsletter, for example) in this count.

Phishing e-mail accounted for 22 per cent of the spam received by the Italian volunteers and 18 per cent of the US ones. In general, spam appears to still largely be delivered in English; French- and German-language spam were the only non-English spam to amount to more than 10 per cent of spam received by the participants in France and Germany respectively.

Some oddball facts that emerged from the experiment are that fake Chase.com was the most common phishing e-mail spotted during the project, and that the British volunteers received the most Nigerian scam e-mail.

In addition to Mooney, the other S.P.A.M. participants also kept a blog about the experience, which some found amusing and others disturbing. One participant in Australia named Marika wrote, "I don't know whether I would feel safe to surf to that extent again. I tried to sign up for jobs that would generate an at-home income with what seemed like respectable sites, however these sites led to massive amounts of spam."