What Happens When You Reply To ALL of Your Spam 402
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."
Re:Why a Windows PC? (Score:5, Informative)
Link to Spam diaries (Score:5, Informative)
McAfee Spam Experiment [mcafeespamexperiment.com]
Old spam (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Hey Networkworld.com, (Score:3, Informative)
sounds familiar...oh yeah I remember now! (Score:5, Informative)
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)
Re:They seemed legit... (Score:5, Informative)
That was kinda the idea... deliberately reply to all of the spam in order to document what happens. She's not an idiot, she was pretending to be one.
I'd say RTFA, but then you might say I must be new here >.>
Slowdowns (Score:4, Informative)
Slow Server! (Score:5, Informative)
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:Worth the cost? (Score:3, Informative)
Please don't (Score:5, Informative)
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.
2 words (Score:3, Informative)
Firefox
Noscript
Re:If done correctly, that could be useful. :) (Score:3, Informative)
Doesn't matter what spyware/crapware they put on it as long as you follow standard procedure. Wipe the bitch and install a crap free Os on it before the CPU is even warmed up.
Re:Why a Windows PC? (Score:3, Informative)
Stupid dependencies, eh?
Re:Why a Windows PC? (Score:5, Informative)
Funny as that may be, Bliss -- AFAIK the most famous Linux virus -- has an uninstall routine invoked by passing the infected program the argument --bliss-disinfect-files-please.
Not very user-friendly, but look at the features!
Welcome to my world (Score:2, Informative)
That's about 50,000 messages shy of what I get every month without replying to spam. Just use the same address on the net for 15 years and you too can bask in the faux adoration that two thousand five hundred spam messages a day can bring.
Murphy's laws of Combat No 9 (Score:2, Informative)
Murphy's Laws of Combat law number nine:
Never Draw Enemy Fire, It Irritates Your Team Mates
This is definitely drawing enemy fire, however your team mates are a bunch of dummies. It is interesting no matter what type environment you are in, drawing enemy fire is a stupid thing to do... unless you are in a test environment where everything is sacrificial.
I had one person here, out of curiosity, reply to one spam message and my mail server got an ton of spam in response to that. I discover responding to spam is like starting a chain reaction in a nuclear device and my guess when you reply to on spam message that it goes to evil botnet network that shares your email address to all of them and they in turn send spam/malware/junk back to you.
Death to spam and extreme pain to the people who create it. Dying is too good for those people.
Small Sample Size (Score:3, Informative)
Five people per country is not a very large sample.
Incidentally, I get small but regular amount of spam in Russian, Spanish and Chinese.
Re:Please don't (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:more irony (Score:5, Informative)
Is it really to do about being informed or not?
Just check out a typical spam:
1) From address - fake
2) Subject line often has nothing to do with the content or is nonsensical
3) Much of the content after the "sell" is often nothing to do with the spammer's sell line.
4) Sometimes even the dates are forged
5) The headers are often forged (but nobody really looks)
So who buys? Someone who is willing to give out money to someone who is telling them > 90% lies or garbage.
AFAIK even politicians tell the truth more than 10% of the time.
I guess some of the spam is due to stupid PHBs who pay spammers money to send out spam to sell stuff. So even if it doesn't work they don't know for sure. A bit like advertising - you never know how much of it really works.
Re:Free PC from MacAfee! Limited Offer! Reply toda (Score:2, Informative)
[A pop-up?] Wow, that's retro. How did you get Firefox to do that?
Easy. A site can show a pop-up when the user clicks a link. Firefox detects it as a user-initiated pop-up and doesn't block it.
Re:Rising fuel costs solved (Score:3, Informative)
TinLC
For those not understandng this,
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/TINLC.html [catb.org]
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/L/Lumber-Cartel.html [catb.org]
Re:Hormel just called (Score:1, Informative)
I am Luxembourg, you insensitive clod! :(
Now get off me.