Slashdot Mirror
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."
So, you get a "free" computer in exchange for replying to *every* spam email that you get each day?
They said the average US participant got 70 per day. Say an average of 30 seconds to a minute to reply to each? (Some asked to fill out forms, apply for job postings etc. so those should fall well over the one minute mark.)
I think you could easily hit an hour or more per day just replying to spam emails, for 365 days a year!
That's about 9 weeks of full time work, all for a computer that is going to be seriously f'd up with malware and spyware and really shouldn't be used for anything personal until the year is up and it's been reformatted.
So you get a year old computer after spending 9 weeks of your time answering lame spam messages.
Guess everyone has a different definition of "free".
(By comparison, if you spend 2 weeks working for $6 an hour you'd have almost $500 and could probably buy a computer as good as what you were given. If you worked the same 9 weeks you'd take home over $2k. )
A Nigerian once spent his time Concocting a Scam 419 A few mums and dads Spent all that they had Which just shows there's no end to the crime
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
They pay to send it to me, and they pay to get it all back from me.
Don't forget to tape the reply envelope to a brick before you mail it back.