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What Happens When You Reply To ALL of Your Spam

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tue Jul 01, 2008 04:54 PM
from the i'm-sure-it-really-helps dept.
Spam
bednarz writes "For Tracy Mooney, a married mother of three in Naperville, Ill., the decision to abandon cyber-sense and invite e-mail spam into her life for a month by participating in a McAfee experiment was a bit of a lark. The idea of the Spammed Persistently All Month (S.P.A.M.) experiment — which fittingly started on April Fool's Day — was to have 50 volunteers from around the world answer every spam message and pop-up ad they got. Mooney was game, especially since McAfee was giving a free PC to all participants. She told her story to Network World."
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Submission: What happens when you reply to spam -- all of it by bednarz (1026650)
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  • Long story short (Score:5, Funny)

    by gnick (1211984) on Tuesday July 01 2008, @04:56PM (#24022717) Homepage

    The Nigerian prince send her millions.
    She got 1000 Valium for $4.
    Her lover was more satisfied.
    And she won an iPod.

    And lived happily ever after. =)

  • I find the idea of doing this to receive a free PC a fantastic irony, don't you?

    • more irony (Score:5, Interesting)

      by globaljustin (574257) <jeffersonhuxleyNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday July 01 2008, @05:16PM (#24022957)

      My first reaction to the story was, "Good PR stunt...otherwise pointless"...until I RTFA and found this quote from the Naperville soccer mom regarding what she found in her in-box:

      "It's all snake oil. I'm amazed at what true junk is out there when you're clicking through on e-mail."

      Apparently people are less informed about spam than I thought, and this little one month 'contest' really is raising awareness and educating people...

      • Re:more irony (Score:5, Funny)

        by joNDoty (774185) on Tuesday July 01 2008, @05:58PM (#24023403)

        Also shocking:

        "'It grew exponentially, so I stopped giving out my home address,' she says, adding, 'I am concerned about the environment.'"

        She gave our her home address.

        • Re:more irony (Score:5, Insightful)

          by shellbeach (610559) on Tuesday July 01 2008, @07:28PM (#24024277)

          She gave our her home address.

          Yeah, that scared me too. I would have thought McAfee had a duty of care to prevent the participant doing something like that.

          Giving a real, existing address to the scum of the earth can't be good for your health. Why didn't they set her up a PO Box or something?

          Incidentally, the other worrying thing was this quote:

          Overall, the most obvious result of the S.P.A.M. experiment was that the PC that McAfee had provided for the project noticeably slowed down, clogged up with spyware, Mooney says.

          I really hope there was some sort of firewall running on that machine ...

    • A bit, perhaps, but I view it as a practicality: They thoughtfully provide her with a replacement for what used to be her computer, but now is a smoking, virus- and trojan-infected hole in her desk..

  • Link to Spam diaries (Score:5, Informative)

    by Jeremy Erwin (2054) on Tuesday July 01 2008, @05:01PM (#24022771) Journal

    McAfee Spam Experiment [mcafeespamexperiment.com]

  • Old spam (Score:5, Informative)

    by Vollernurd (232458) on Tuesday July 01 2008, @05:01PM (#24022775) Homepage

    As much as it would be good if she did indeed win the free iPod and get her hands on all that va_l1um, most spam that gets stored on my spam folder looks to be pretty old. I got a circular/spam message from the depths of hell the other day telling me to keep an eye out for some astral phenomenon or other. A Google search revealed that said event occurred in about 2006.

    Zombie relays sending out the same shite day after day. Most spam is totally useless. A bit like the Sky TV schedulers.

  • I did a bit of a war on spam... (Score:5, Funny)

    by pitchpipe (708843) on Tuesday July 01 2008, @05:02PM (#24022779)
    myself when I was new on the internet. I didn't know at first that the unsubscribe on the bottom of the email was just a way to verify that it was a live address, so I got lots.

    What I decided was that the companies that were paying for the spam must like it, so I would click on the link in the spam, find their customer service email and copy it. Then I went to google and entered "subscribe enter email". After that I spent quite a lot of hours signing these companies up for all kinds of email. I hope they liked it. When I had to put in a name I entered Spam War.

      • Please don't (Score:5, Informative)

        by XanC (644172) on Tuesday July 01 2008, @05:41PM (#24023207)

        It sounds like you send an enormous amount of backscatter [wikipedia.org], and are probably doing much more harm than good. It would be much better to simply drop the connection at SMTP time, rather than accepting and then generating a bounce. Or do like I do, and hold their connection open for a long time before actually dropping it.

            • Re:Please don't (Score:5, Informative)

              by XanC (644172) on Tuesday July 01 2008, @09:29PM (#24025305)

              But the recipient, it at least many cases, isn't the person who sent the message!

              What good does that do you or them?

              If you reject at SMTP time, the sender (if one really exists) gets a notification from his SMTP server, including whatever string your server put in its 5xx response. If it was a spambot, nobody gets anything at all. Which is how it should be.

              Simply not including the spam itself doesn't absolve you from contributing to massive amounts of email going to people who have nothing to do with anything. And that is still called backscatter.

  • well (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Romancer (19668) <romancer@NOsPam.deathsdoor.com> on Tuesday July 01 2008, @05:02PM (#24022783) Journal

    "Mooney says, noting that the sudden upsurge in junk mail left the neighborhood postman somewhat aghast. "It grew exponentially, so I stopped giving out my home address," she says, adding, "I am concerned about the environment.""

    It's all well and good that she had an alias and a free pc to be subject to this open invitation for harassment, but to actually really give out your home address to these spammers is a bit reckless. She will, at a minimum, be regretting this for years since the "current resident" will be getting spam even if she directs the post office not to deliver mail to her alias.

  • sounds familiar...oh yeah I remember now! (Score:5, Informative)

    by ObjetDart (700355) on Tuesday July 01 2008, @05:08PM (#24022869)

    Reminds of this great poem from years ago:

    http://www.satirewire.com/features/poetry_spam/01free_winner.shtml [satirewire.com]

    I Answered All My Spam

    I never know what I might find,
    on any day I go online.
    I used to get in quite a huff,
    while wading through unwanted stuff.
    But then I changed the man I am,
    the day I answered all my spam.

    Now every time I check my box,
    I load up on fantastic stocks.
    I'll gladly say I felt no loss,
    when, with a smile, I fired my boss.
    With just one click, the best thing yet,
    I freed myself of all my debt.

    I have, paying a few small fees,
    ten university degrees.
    Now that I'm losing all this weight,
    I'm sure, someday, I'll get a date.
    Instead of going to a show,
    I spy on everyone I know.
    (That's easy, since I have in hand,
    this nifty wireless video cam.)

    I spend my evenings viewing screens,
    of barely legal horny teens.
    And with a little credit charge,
    Whoopee! My penis was enlarged!
    Meanwhile these shots of Britney Spears
    should be enough to last for years.

    And so I lead this online life,
    my monitor is now my wife.
    It has become my greatest dream,
    to launch my own get-rich-quick scheme.
    And if you think you might get missed,
    relax, you're on my e-mail list.

  • Irony (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ioldanach (88584) on Tuesday July 01 2008, @05:08PM (#24022875)
    Too bad it won't let me read page two of the article because it first starts by trying to ask me to complete a survey about their site then starts redirecting me elsewhere. I think that qualifies as irony.

  • Wow, really shows who spam is coined at (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Nichotin (794369) on Tuesday July 01 2008, @05:10PM (#24022887)
    Sentences like this sort of nails it: "It's all snake oil. I'm amazed at what true junk is out there when you're clicking through on e-mail."
    It tells a sad tale about the people these spam messages are targeted at. You really don't have to be computer literate to figure out that all this is pure crap. Judging by the dumploads of messages that hits my spam filter every day there must be too many fools with computers and internet access waiting to be parted from their money. Some times I wonder if I should start spamming, we really don't have harsh sentences in Norway...

    On a slightly offtopic note, she looks kinda M.I.L.F.!

  • I'm shocked. SHOCKED that spam is a scam! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by spirit_fingers (777604) on Tuesday July 01 2008, @05:16PM (#24022955)

    I think her reaction to her spam is classic: "I was horrified," says Mooney, a realtor by profession. "It's all snake oil. I'm amazed at what true junk is out there when you're clicking through on e-mail."

    Spammers love people like her--people so insulated by American corporate media that they think the internet is just another shopping mall. And what could possibly go wrong in a mall? God bless her.

  • Slow Server! (Score:5, Informative)

    by FudRucker (866063) on Tuesday July 01 2008, @05:24PM (#24023019)
    [Article Text]

    For Tracy Mooney, a married mother of three in Naperville, Ill., the decision to abandon cyber-sense and invite e-mail spam into her life for a month by participating in a McAfee experiment was a bit of a lark.

    The idea of the Spammed Persistently All Month (S.P.A.M.) experiment which fittingly started on April Fool's Day was to have 50 volunteers from around the world answer every spam message and pop-up ad on their PC.

    What would be the experience in 10 countries when everyday people, armed with a PC and e-mail account McAfee provided for the Global S.P.A.M. Diaries project, clicked through the spam and chronicled the results?

    Mooney who had observed the family's PC crippled just before Christmas by a virus was game, especially because McAfee was giving a free PC to all participants. She was selected to be among the 50 volunteers picked by McAfee out of 2,000 people who applied to be part of the adventure.

    By the time it was all over, after every bank-account phishing scam, Nigerian bank scheme, and offer for medication, adult content and just plain free stuff had been pursued. "I was horrified," says Mooney, a realtor by profession. "It's all snake oil. I'm amazed at what true junk is out there when you're clicking through on e-mail."

    McAfee is releasing the results Tuesday of its free-wheeling month-long S.P.A.M. experiment, done largely to illustrate if you didn't know already how spam is connected to malware and criminal activity, not to mention some of the slimiest marketing ever devised.

    Each S.P.A.M. volunteer saw an average of 70 spam messages arrive in their in-box each day, with men receiving about 15 more per day than women. That was a lot to answer, but "Penelope Retch" the alias that Mooney chose for her S.P.A.M. adventure answered every single message.

    In her guise as Penelope Retch, Mooney answered the e-mail that came into her account. "I'd see an interactive spam, open it, click on it and asked to be removed. That would only make it worse," she says. "They'd say 'no.'"

    Whether trying to win an iPod online, get free travel brochures, weight-loss tea or Maybelline eyeliner, the effect of entering a home address was extreme. Immediately, a deluge of mail landed at her doorstep, directed to the attention of Penelope Retch.

    "One of the mail offers I got was a $7,500 credit card for Penelope Retch," Mooney says, noting that the sudden upsurge in junk mail left the neighborhood postman somewhat aghast. "It grew exponentially, so I stopped giving out my home address," she says, adding, "I am concerned about the environment."

    Mooney clicked through on the phishing e-mails for fake Wells Fargo and other bank sites, sat back as the supposed government of Nigeria sought to give her an inheritance, and watched a foreign IP address go after a dummy PayPal account that had been set up as part of the S.P.A.M. experiment.

    Overall, the most obvious result of the S.P.A.M. experiment was that the PC that McAfee had provided for the project noticeably slowed down, clogged up with spyware, Mooney says.

    According to McAfee, which selected five participants from each of 10 countries for the S.P.A.M. experiment, the five U.S. 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 5,000 to 9,000-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% of the spam received by the Italian volunteers and 18% of the U.S. ones. In general, spam appears to still largely be delivered in English; French- and German-language spam were the only non-English spam to amo

    • Re:Slow Server! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by tomhudson (43916) <hudsonNO@SPAMvideotron.ca> on Tuesday July 01 2008, @05:58PM (#24023401) Journal

      McAfee is releasing the results Tuesday of its free-wheeling month-long S.P.A.M. experiment, done largely to illustrate if you didn't know already how spam is connected to malware and criminal activity, not to mention some of the slimiest marketing ever devised.

      Sounds like the pot calling the kettle black. The woman doing the surfing is a "realtor", (they're now more commonly known as realtwhores, not "realtors" or "real estate agents"), and anti-virus vendors are helping continue the Windows near-monopoly. They need Microsoft, and Microsoft needs them. One of them (Symantec) sent me I don't know how many spams offering to protect my "Windows PC" - to which I replied "What Windows PC, you f*ckheads - stop spamming me!" They didn't. I ended up abandoning the account.

  • Spam count (Score:5, Interesting)

    by yoyhed (651244) on Tuesday July 01 2008, @08:49PM (#24024967)
    I'm surprised she only ended up with 23,000 spam at the end of the month, when purposely giving out her address. Ever since getting Gmail in 2004, I have been completely careless about giving out my address, but never gave it to spammers on purpose. I now have 7,742 messages in my Spam folder, which deletes messages after 30 days, so that's what I get in a month. I only see 1 or 2 of those 7k each month :-)

    • Re:Why a Windows PC? (Score:5, Informative)

      by QuantumRiff (120817) on Tuesday July 01 2008, @05:00PM (#24022757)
      Because in the article (I know, I know) they say that they also documented spyware, popup software, and general machine slowdowns from clicking on all the popup ads. That was kinda the point of the excersise.

    • Re:Why a Windows PC? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gnick (1211984) on Tuesday July 01 2008, @05:05PM (#24022829) Homepage

      Since the point of the experiment wasn't to test the operating system, why give the test subjects the operating system currently most affected by malaware[sic]?

      Because the point of the experiment was to test the effect of replying to spam which has nothing to do with the operating system. They gave away PCs with the most popular operating system since they assumed that's what most of their participants would want.

      • Re:Why a Windows PC? (Score:5, Funny)

        by Qatz (1209584) on Tuesday July 01 2008, @05:10PM (#24022883)

        Because Macs are completely immune to spyware and viruses the Windows and Linux people have to worry about 24/7?

        Yeah one time I found a linux virus! However I never did get it to run on my linux box...

        • Re:Why a Windows PC? (Score:5, Funny)

          by Silver Sloth (770927) on Tuesday July 01 2008, @05:15PM (#24022943)
          Look, it's easy, you just go on any of the Linux support sites where you'll get lot's of helpful people telling you what a noob you are for not editing /etc/virus.conf properly and then recompiling the kernel and anyway, if you had used the right distro then you could have used apt-get or up2date to download the virus properly and...

        • Re:Why a Windows PC? (Score:5, Funny)

          by Cajun Hell (725246) on Tuesday July 01 2008, @05:35PM (#24023157) Homepage Journal

          Yeah one time I found a linux virus! However I never did get it to run on my linux box...

          There's a lib_compat_virus tarball in /pub/dist over at univ-mainz.de. Go get it and untar it. ./configure it with --enable-activex and --disable-pax, but also make sure to read the fucking install.txt for other configuration options relevant to your system. (I don't want to fucking hear from you if you don't RTFM!) Compile it with gcc 2.95, and sudo install it. Then edit /etc/virus.cf and set config_allow_tainted_nonGPL_virus to 0xFE. Your virus should work then.

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