What Happens When You Reply To ALL of Your 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."

Comments

Re:Why a Windows PC?

[QuantumRiff]

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.

Link to Spam diaries

[Jeremy Erwin]

McAfee Spam Experiment

Old spam

[Vollernurd]

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.

sounds familiar...oh yeah I remember now!

[ObjetDart]

Reminds of this great poem from years ago:

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

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.

Please don't

[XanC]

It sounds like you send an enormous amount of backscatter, 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:Why a Windows PC?

[cp.tar]

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!