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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."
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? Why not a Mac or presetup Linux box?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
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.!
Dvorak on Doomtech
... would the address of your local waste recycling center.
Electronic spam is bad because the sender pays almost nothing (just bounces it through zombies).
But if the spammer is paying for PAPER to be delivered ... send more! Drive up their costs and drive them out of business.
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:
Apparently people are less informed about spam than I thought, and this little one month 'contest' really is raising awareness and educating people...
Thank you Dave Raggett
There are lots of ways to interpret this, including that English speakers are idiots, but whatever else the spammers aren't being politically correct. They're using English because that is the way to reach people, and for the most part it doesn't pay to translate the same message into another language, even though that can't be very expensive.
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.
the five U.S. participants received the most spam: 23,233 messages over the course of the month.
I have one of the older private domains on the Internet, and for many years it was running a BBS gatewayed to Usenet, and then providing shell accounts. All the email addresses and Usenet Message IDs sat there like a ticking bomb until spammers started harvesting them. At one point I was getting so much spam I had to block China, Brazil, Argentina, and several ISPs in countries like Spain and Italy because the amount of spam I was getting was putting me over my colo's traffic cap to the tune of $750 a month.
Looking at my current logs, yesterday, 17197 delivery attempts were blocked by RBL, 24561 attempts by greylisting, and almost 2000 were blocked by content filtering after receipt. And the only users on this box are myself and my family, who got a total of 81 legitimate messages actually delivered.
That's more messages in one day than they're getting in one month.
I wish it was only as bad as it was in 1997.
One time my wife got so sick of spam that she clicked the unsubscribe link on all the spams she received. Of course, this only told the spamming sites that there was someone on the other end... Now she gets a ton more a day. And she's crazy about deleting it, even when it's in her spam folder. I currently have like 7000 spams in my gmail spam folder and it ticks her off so much to see a number that large.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
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 :-)
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1