A Major British University has spent the last 6 months finding out peoples' reactions to junk e-mail. Their conclusion: Junk E-Mail annoys the hell out of people.

“It might seem like an obvious conclusion, but being researchers it was important we just didn’t follow jump to conclusions. After all, there must be some people who don’t find junk e-mail annoying because if not, what’s the point?” The project leader told us.

“We used various different techniques to gauge peoples’ reactions. The first technique was a street survey in several different area throughout the country. The results of this generally supported our final conclusion except in West Norfolk, where we found out that most people had yet to upgrade their abacuses to receive E-Mail compatibility”

“The second technique was to email survey people who had signed up to our Universities newsletter. As we received no replies to any of the 660,000 or so emails we sent we can only assume that these people sent our E-Mails straight to their ‘trash can’ – thus supporting our final conclusion.”

“The final technique was to set up several fake ‘junk mail sites’ and advertise them through junk E-Mails. We would then log how many people visited the sites, or replied to the emails, to get an idea of what percentage of junk mail recipients actually respond to what they receive.”

“Most of the adverts were for pornography sites, although we did advertise a couple of fake Holiday and Car Insurance websites to get a more complete picture. We sent 3 million E-Mails in total and recorded an average of 20 hits per site. And all of those were to unsubscribe from the mailing lists. The rest we can only assume were either picked out by junk mail filters or deleted by the users.

“We did get a reply to one of our emails advertising a pornography website. Apparently the recipient (who we can’t identify for legal reasons) thought that we were contacting him to sponsor his political party. Apparently, he’s used to dealing with companys of our website’s nature.”