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What Happens When You Reply To ALL of Your Spam

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i'm-sure-it-really-helps dept.

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."

4 of 402 comments (clear)

  1. Free PC from MacAfee! Limited Offer! Reply today! by syousef · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    --
    These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
  2. Re:Why a Windows PC? by gnick · · 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.

    --
    He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
  3. I'm shocked. SHOCKED that spam is a scam! by spirit_fingers · · 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.

  4. Re:more irony by shellbeach · · 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 ...