Lycos Europe's "Make love not spam" campaign was intended as a way for users to fight back against the avalanche of junk mail messages coming their way.

Participants were encouraged to download the Lycos screensaver which, when their PC was idle, would then send lots of data traffic to websites that peddle the goods and services mentioned in spam messages.

Lycos said the idea was to get the spam sites running at 95% capacity and generate big bandwidth bills for the spammers behind the sites.

Two of the sites being bombarded by data have been completely knocked offline. One other site has been responding to requests only intermittently as it struggles to cope with the traffic the screensaver is pointing its way.

The downing of the sites could dent Lycos claims that what it is doing does not amount to a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). In such attacks thousands of computers bombard sites with data in an attempt to overwhelm them.