However, it seems that though we are only fifth in the global spam league, receiving less unsolicited email than those in the US, Brazil, Italy, and Mexico, here in the UK we are most likely to be targeted by Nigerian scammers.

The Nigerian or 419 scam involves promising the recipient of an email a fortune in return for their bank account details. According to security firm McAfee, 23 per cent of these emails end up in British Inboxes.

Eighteen per cent of spam emails containing pornographic content end up in the UK, with only the US receiving more.

McAfee asked 50 people around the world to take part in a 30-day experiment where they surfed the web unprotected.

In those 30 days, the average number of spam emails received by a participant was 2,096, working out to about 70 unsolicited messages per day. Eight per cent of the emails were phishing scams.

Dave De Walt of McAfee said: "I think we can see from the experiment that spam is undeniably linked to cybercrime, however it is such an immense problem and it's never going to go away. It's no longer a question of 'solving' it, but one of 'managing' it."

A separate report from rival security firm MessageLabs issued today found that spammers were changing their tactics to insult the recipients of their emails to provoke them into doing something stupid.

www.mcafeespamexperiment.com

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