Yet global survey finds many admit to purchasing spammed products.

Email users around the world hate spam and worry about viruses, but that’s where the similarities essentially end, according to Yahoo!’s first global survey of email culture. It polled close to 37,000 users on five continents, to view spam and computer viruses through their eyes.

Yahoo! Mail surveyed users in eleven countries -- Argentina, Australia, Britain, Brazil, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Spain and the United States.

The survey found that Americans in general are either extremely active and knowledgeable about eliminating spam -- or very uninformed and indifferent. To protect themselves, 78 percent of Americans delete spam messages and 58 percent use a spam filter.

However, one-third of Americans continue to respond to spam messages, perpetuating the problem. What's worse, one out of five people admit to purchasing products from spammers.

Of others who admit they respond to spam, the Japanese stand out as the most active, with almost one-half of the survey respondents indicating they send spammers angry replies.

Most Brazilians, on the other hand, simply never respond, followed by the French.

When it comes to fighting spam, the Australians are masters of many techniques, from simple deletion, to using multiple or unique addresses, to running filters.

The Japanese, Germans, Chinese and Americans overwhelmingly prefer to just delete junk mail.

Argentineans even avoid shopping online for fear of later receiving spam.

Viruses and virus protection elicited the most uniform set of responses globally, perhaps because of the longer-known perils. People are vigilant when it comes to viruses, with 70 percent or more respondents in each country having anti-virus software on their computers.

Indeed, people around the world are knowledgeable about viruses across the board -- with most people in most countries relying on their email provider to scan every email and clean attachments before opening.

Across the globe, most say that if a virus caused the loss of email, it would be worse than losing TV or radio.

Other interesting findings:

What would consumers be most willing to do to rid the world of spam?

• Americans would floss their teeth everyday
• More Italians would avoid cigarettes, fast food and stick to their diets
• The British and Spanish-speakers would be the most fit through exercise
• The Germans, Spanish, Japanese would generally not change any habits at all.

Spam stresses-out email users

Users around the world agree that spam is more stressful than traffic jams. In addition:

• Americans, Argentineans, Australians and British also believe it is more stressful than going to the dentist but not nearly as stressful as moving to a new house/apartment
• The French, Germans, Italians, Spanish, Brazilians and Spanish-speakers think it is not nearly as stressful as going on a first date.