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?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Macs are completely immune to spyware and viruses the Windows and Linux people have to worry about 24/7?

Re:Why a Windows PC?

[twitter]

Because Windows most needs help/replacement and that help/snake-oil is what McAfee sells.

Birds of a feather. Security Absurdity!

[twitter]

They sell Windows AV. They have a lot in common with people offering "free iPods". Stunts like this serve two objectives: They advertise McAffee and they give the illusion that user actions make a difference. The false conclusion we are supposed to draw is that you can somehow be spam free if only you do this or that instead of this and that. This is well discussed in the Security Absurdity articles. That attitude is required for both Windows and AV vendors to survive but people are not nearly as dumb as M$ needs them to be.

OMG!!11One

[Anonymous Coward]

Frost Pits

Re:I did a bit of a war on spam...

[jez9999]

I figured out a really good system for stopping spam. My server immediately drops ANY incoming SMTP connection. It's dropped my spam to zero, and checking my logs, it really does seem to have stopped an awful lot.