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."
Free PC from MacAfee! Limited Offer! Reply today! (Score:5, Insightful)
I find the idea of doing this to receive a free PC a fantastic irony, don't you?
They seemed legit... (Score:1, Insightful)
I tried to sign up for jobs that would generate an at-home income with what seemed like respectable sites, however these sites led to massive amounts of spam.
Idiot.
well (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Re:Why a Windows PC? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
If done correctly, that could be useful. :) (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering all the spyware and such that was installed ... wouldn't an anti-virus company be interested in it?
Re:Why a Windows PC? (Score:1, Insightful)
Because Macs and Linux machines are completely immune to spyware and viruses the Windows people have to worry about 24/7?
There, fixed it for you.
Re:Why a Windows PC? (Score:3, Insightful)
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]?
Sorry for replying to the same comment twice, but I have to add this: This was sponsored by McAfee. Why in the hell would they give away Linux or Mac boxes? They try to sell products for those operating systems, but they make up almost none of their market base.
I'm shocked. SHOCKED that spam is a scam! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why a Windows PC? (Score:2, Insightful)
Practical Value? (Score:3, Insightful)
For instance, the experiment would have been potentially useful if Penelope Retch had a few honeypot credit cards and bank accounts to give out to spammers and phishing websites.
Also of interest (at least to /.ers), the address I formerly used in my usenet sig still gets a TON of pornographic spam, promising some rather graphic scenery... and apparently I'm not all that uncommon. Did any of her volunteers reply to the pr0n spam? Did they get a deluge of pornographic material on their doorsteps?
Re:Long story short (Score:1, Insightful)
Spam, the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.
(sorry, Homer!)
What Happens When You Reply To ALL of Your Spam? (Score:2, Insightful)
OK.... so what happened ?
All I got from TFA was that she got spammed, and if you dont use McAfee products, you too will end up with 10,000 spam messages a month and your PC will "slow down".
TFA was a puff piece with absolutely no detail to speak of.
Title should have read - "Spammed for a month for a free PC"
Re:more irony (Score:5, Insightful)
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 ...
Re:A better address to use ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Something like 97% of *all* email received at my college is dumped by Barracuda even before it hits our system. That's an enormous drain on our network for *zero* value to us, not to mention the cost of the email blocker, cost of personnel to maintain it, cost of the time needed to fix false positives and of course the time to deal with the FBI when a child porn spam sneaks through and one of your professors calls them directly. (No, I'm not joking about the latter)
I suspect that you have no real idea of the scale of spam since your ISP is probably blocking the vast majority of it for you. That service isn't free- you're paying for it.
Re:Point: "Reply" doesn't mean "Hit the reply butt (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm confused. You start off telling us that you understand that return addresses on spam are fake.
From the rest of your comment, however, it seems you are still using them to send out messages. Please tell me I'm misreading.
Backscatter is a big problem; if you are really doing what it sounds like you are doing, mail server operators and domain owners everywhere hate you.
Re:Birds of a feather. Security Absurdity! (Score:3, Insightful)
If you'd actually read the post, rather than seeing 'twitter' - FOAM, LATHER, PSYCHOSIS - you'd have seen that he said user actions make no difference against spam. Not viruses/malware/trojans.
From twitter's post:
"The false conclusion we are supposed to draw is that you can somehow be spam free if only you do this or that...."
Yes, he referred to antivirus software, but the only connection I saw was that antivirus vendors often include antispam features in their full Internet security products. Of course, this wasn't mentioned, but it's a safe assumption that most people on this board know that pretty much every antivirus vendor also makes an antispam product. And since this study was to do with spam, after all, it seems safe to not specifically mention the antispam product in the comments.
You, however, would rather go off on a foaming at the mouth, psychotic tirade as soon as you grep twitter anywhere close to a comment.
Thrown any chairs lately?
"I'm going to ****ing kill twitter!!!"
Re:more irony (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, you can monitor and record the effectiveness of advertising quite well. There are entire businesses whose sole purpose is to show the market research to prove this and has for decades. The very large marketing firm I used to work for wouldn't have sold advert #2 if they hadn't proved that advert #1 increased sales.
I'm sorry, but your statement regarding this is utterly wrong. If it was that vague, or if you completely discount the ability to sway the minds of customers through advertisement then the entire industry would be a wash.