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

Wow, really shows who spam is coined at

[Nichotin]

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.!

A better address to use ...

[khasim]

... 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.

more irony

[globaljustin]

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:

"It's all snake oil. I'm amazed at what true junk is out there when you're clicking through on e-mail."

Apparently people are less informed about spam than I thought, and this little one month 'contest' really is raising awareness and educating people...

Re:Slow Server!

[tomhudson]

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.

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.

Spam count

[yoyhed]

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 :-)