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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."
The Nigerian prince send her millions.
She got 1000 Valium for $4.
Her lover was more satisfied.
And she won an iPod.
And lived happily ever after. =)
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
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
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
McAfee Spam Experiment
As much as it would be good if she did indeed win the free iPod and get her hands on all that va_l1um, most spam that gets stored on my spam folder looks to be pretty old. I got a circular/spam message from the depths of hell the other day telling me to keep an eye out for some astral phenomenon or other. A Google search revealed that said event occurred in about 2006.
Zombie relays sending out the same shite day after day. Most spam is totally useless. A bit like the Sky TV schedulers.
Smokey, this is not 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules.
myself when I was new on the internet. I didn't know at first that the unsubscribe on the bottom of the email was just a way to verify that it was a live address, so I got lots.
What I decided was that the companies that were paying for the spam must like it, so I would click on the link in the spam, find their customer service email and copy it. Then I went to google and entered "subscribe enter email". After that I spent quite a lot of hours signing these companies up for all kinds of email. I hope they liked it. When I had to put in a name I entered Spam War.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
"Mooney says, noting that the sudden upsurge in junk mail left the neighborhood postman somewhat aghast. "It grew exponentially, so I stopped giving out my home address," she says, adding, "I am concerned about the environment.""
It's all well and good that she had an alias and a free pc to be subject to this open invitation for harassment, but to actually really give out your home address to these spammers is a bit reckless. She will, at a minimum, be regretting this for years since the "current resident" will be getting spam even if she directs the post office not to deliver mail to her alias.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
Not only did I find it ironic that an article about spam would be interrupted by an obnoxious pop-up that blackened the article in the background until clicking out of it, but I won't participate in your "survey" designed to send me more spam, and I won't be visiting your site anymore. kthnx
Considering all the spyware and such that was installed ... wouldn't an anti-virus company be interested in it?
Reminds of this great poem from years ago:
http://www.satirewire.com/features/poetry_spam/01free_winner.shtml
I Answered All My Spam
I never know what I might find,
on any day I go online.
I used to get in quite a huff,
while wading through unwanted stuff.
But then I changed the man I am,
the day I answered all my spam.
Now every time I check my box,
I load up on fantastic stocks.
I'll gladly say I felt no loss,
when, with a smile, I fired my boss.
With just one click, the best thing yet,
I freed myself of all my debt.
I have, paying a few small fees,
ten university degrees.
Now that I'm losing all this weight,
I'm sure, someday, I'll get a date.
Instead of going to a show,
I spy on everyone I know.
(That's easy, since I have in hand,
this nifty wireless video cam.)
I spend my evenings viewing screens,
of barely legal horny teens.
And with a little credit charge,
Whoopee! My penis was enlarged!
Meanwhile these shots of Britney Spears
should be enough to last for years.
And so I lead this online life,
my monitor is now my wife.
It has become my greatest dream,
to launch my own get-rich-quick scheme.
And if you think you might get missed,
relax, you're on my e-mail list.
I read Usenet for the articles.
Too bad it won't let me read page two of the article because it first starts by trying to ask me to complete a survey about their site then starts redirecting me elsewhere. I think that qualifies as irony.
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.
I can just see it coming ...
To all of my friends, I do not usually forward messages, But this is from my good friend Pearlas Sandborn and she really is an attorney.
If she says that this will work - It will work. After all, What have you got to lose? SORRY EVERYBODY.. JUST HAD TO TAKE THE CHANCE!!! I'm an attorney, And I know the law. This thing is for real. Rest assured McAfee will follow through with their promises for this S.P.A.M. test mail.
Dear Friends; Please do not take this for a junk letter. If you ignore this, You will repent later. McAfee is now the largest anti-virus software company and in an effort to make sure that their product remains the most widely used program, they are running an e-mail beta test.
When you forward this e-mail to friends, McAfee can and will track it ( If you are a Microsoft Windows user) For a two weeks time period.
For every person that you forward this e-mail to, McAfee will pay you $245.00 For every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, McAfee will pay you $243.00 and for every third person that receives it, You will be paid $241.00. Within two weeks, McAfee will contact you for your address and then send you a check.
I thought this was a scam myself, But two weeks after receiving this e-mail and forwarding it on. McAfee contacted me for my address and within days, I receive a check for $2,500.00. You need to respond before the beta testing is over.
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
That was kinda the idea... deliberately reply to all of the spam in order to document what happens. She's not an idiot, she was pretending to be one.
I'd say RTFA, but then you might say I must be new here >.>
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
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.
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
I wonder, if they ever compared the speed of a clean install of Windows with an anti-virus to a malware messed up install of Windows and see how fast they were. In most cases I find that the anti-virus computer is slower then the one with a ton of viruses!!! And this being McAfee, I don't think that they would worry about slowdowns much (can't read TFA it doesn't want to load or is Slashdotted) because it seems that any computer with McAfee/Norton/any other commercial AV, is slow, really slow. Even on XP with newer hardware it still is slow.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Anyone have networkworld.com crash FF3 repeatedly?
Yeah, Kefka got pretty mad.
[Article Text]
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 on their PC.
What would be the experience in 10 countries when everyday people, armed with a PC and e-mail account McAfee provided for the Global S.P.A.M. Diaries project, clicked through the spam and chronicled the results?
Mooney who had observed the family's PC crippled just before Christmas by a virus was game, especially because McAfee was giving a free PC to all participants. She was selected to be among the 50 volunteers picked by McAfee out of 2,000 people who applied to be part of the adventure.
By the time it was all over, after every bank-account phishing scam, Nigerian bank scheme, and offer for medication, adult content and just plain free stuff had been pursued. "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."
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.
Each S.P.A.M. volunteer saw an average of 70 spam messages arrive in their in-box each day, with men receiving about 15 more per day than women. That was a lot to answer, but "Penelope Retch" the alias that Mooney chose for her S.P.A.M. adventure answered every single message.
In her guise as Penelope Retch, Mooney answered the e-mail that came into her account. "I'd see an interactive spam, open it, click on it and asked to be removed. That would only make it worse," she says. "They'd say 'no.'"
Whether trying to win an iPod online, get free travel brochures, weight-loss tea or Maybelline eyeliner, the effect of entering a home address was extreme. Immediately, a deluge of mail landed at her doorstep, directed to the attention of Penelope Retch.
"One of the mail offers I got was a $7,500 credit card for Penelope Retch," Mooney says, noting that the sudden upsurge in junk mail left the neighborhood postman somewhat aghast. "It grew exponentially, so I stopped giving out my home address," she says, adding, "I am concerned about the environment."
Mooney clicked through on the phishing e-mails for fake Wells Fargo and other bank sites, sat back as the supposed government of Nigeria sought to give her an inheritance, and watched a foreign IP address go after a dummy PayPal account that had been set up as part of the S.P.A.M. experiment.
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.
According to McAfee, which selected five participants from each of 10 countries for the S.P.A.M. experiment, the five U.S. participants received the most spam: 23,233 messages over the course of the month.
Brazil and Italy were in the 15,000-plus category, and Mexico and United Kingdom above 10,000. Australia, The Netherlands and Spain were in the 5,000 to 9,000-plus spam range. The S.P.A.M. volunteers in France and Germany got the least, less than 3,000 for the month. McAfee didn't even include what it calls "grey mail" (e-mail that arrived after participants signed up for a newsletter, for example) in this count.
Phishing e-mail accounted for 22% of the spam received by the Italian volunteers and 18% of the U.S. ones. In general, spam appears to still largely be delivered in English; French- and German-language spam were the only non-English spam to amo
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
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.
The experiment is called S.P.A.M., not S.P.A.Y. Spammed Persistently All Month (not year). So you get a free computer for around 30 hours of work. Not too bad. RTFA.
You ment month.
You meant meant.
This guy's the limit!
Well you must be since you're implying you read the article...
You're nothing; like me.
It sounds like you send an enormous amount of backscatter, and are probably doing much more harm than good. It would be much better to simply drop the connection at SMTP time, rather than accepting and then generating a bounce. Or do like I do, and hold their connection open for a long time before actually dropping it.
A bit, perhaps, but I view it as a practicality: They thoughtfully provide her with a replacement for what used to be her computer, but now is a smoking, virus- and trojan-infected hole in her desk..
For instance, the experiment would have been potentially useful if Penelope Retch had a few honeypot credit cards and bank accounts to give out to spammers and phishing websites.
Also of interest (at least to /.ers), the address I formerly used in my usenet sig still gets a TON of pornographic spam, promising some rather graphic scenery... and apparently I'm not all that uncommon. Did any of her volunteers reply to the pr0n spam? Did they get a deluge of pornographic material on their doorsteps?
I can see the fnords!
I'll bet they didn't go to the site of TFA. Talk about pop-ups! :-/
Firefox
Noscript
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
I love to do that, too! I've noticed, though, that nowadays a lot of companies have individually printed business reply mail that contains a serial number that probably maps to my name and address (how did they know that my parents, Mr. & Mrs. Resident, named me Current?). If I send it back, they'll know exactly who did it. Technically, that should tell them to stop sending to me since they're just wasting their time, but it proves that I'm reading their ads (rather than just dumping the junk mail), and I would much rather they get the feedback that "the generic recipient" is pissed off at their mass mailing, rather than any one particular person.
(On a side note: yes, I did try once specifically respond to a charity organization to take me off their list. I said that I would no longer contribute (I had contributed once) and could they please save my sanity --as well as their costs-- by taking me off the list. I kept getting more and more physical junk mail, almost as if they were being encouraged by my entreaties to stop. I threatened to diss them for wasting their income from donations, and I am making good on that threat with this post.)
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
OK.... so what happened ?
All I got from TFA was that she got spammed, and if you dont use McAfee products, you too will end up with 10,000 spam messages a month and your PC will "slow down".
TFA was a puff piece with absolutely no detail to speak of.
Title should have read - "Spammed for a month for a free PC"
Yeah, my web host actually sold on the admin email I gave them to spammers. Thing is it was a unique address traceable to them. Wonder how much they were paid and by whom. They're quite a big outfit too.
Can't name them as still migrating one account away.
That's about 50,000 messages shy of what I get every month without replying to spam. Just use the same address on the net for 15 years and you too can bask in the faux adoration that two thousand five hundred spam messages a day can bring.
What I find ironic is that on the second page of this story about responding to spam and pop-ups, I got... wait for it... a pop-up.
Anyone else find it amusing that a page on the domain "networkworld" is slashdotted? Perhaps they should focus more on "networktown" or "networkhouse".
In order to win some new RAM
Tracy replied to all of her spam
Her account now abounds
in Nigerian Pounds
And her cock is the size of Wuhan.
The Prime Minister of Luxemberg gives you notice by his royal Appointment that you have been granted a lifetime supply of the Americanned delight. When finished with the spam, please ring the bell twice for the kitchen or once for the Federal Reserve despository.
Murphy's Laws of Combat law number nine:
Never Draw Enemy Fire, It Irritates Your Team Mates
This is definitely drawing enemy fire, however your team mates are a bunch of dummies. It is interesting no matter what type environment you are in, drawing enemy fire is a stupid thing to do... unless you are in a test environment where everything is sacrificial.
I had one person here, out of curiosity, reply to one spam message and my mail server got an ton of spam in response to that. I discover responding to spam is like starting a chain reaction in a nuclear device and my guess when you reply to on spam message that it goes to evil botnet network that shares your email address to all of them and they in turn send spam/malware/junk back to you.
Death to spam and extreme pain to the people who create it. Dying is too good for those people.
Five people per country is not a very large sample.
Incidentally, I get small but regular amount of spam in Russian, Spanish and Chinese.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
I get more than 5000 spam messages a day. They'd have to give me a lot more than a new PC.
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
I'm confused. You start off telling us that you understand that return addresses on spam are fake.
From the rest of your comment, however, it seems you are still using them to send out messages. Please tell me I'm misreading.
Backscatter is a big problem; if you are really doing what it sounds like you are doing, mail server operators and domain owners everywhere hate you.
4096R/EF7BAFA6 79E1 DF98 D09D 898F 9A11 F6F0 DDDC 23FA EF7B AFA6
How did you get Firefox to do that?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Whay aren't the feds doing this then prosecuting the people who send the snail-mail for spamming?
No sig today...
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?
With rising fuel oil costs, this may be the answer. Free fuel delivered to your door for your fireplace.
I wonder how long it will take spammers to catch on. It could be nice while it lasts.
The truth shall set you free!
I have absolutely no spam problems:
"Two years from now, spam will be solved,"
BILL GATES, 2004
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/24/tech/main595595.shtml
Free fuel delivered to your door for your fireplace.
TinLC
That's all I got to say, no comment, move along, nothing to see here.
"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."
It wasn't the PC that slowed down but the operating system. It would have been interesting to conduct that experiment with people using several differen operating systems and then look at the amount of damage and spyware found.
[A pop-up?] Wow, that's retro. How did you get Firefox to do that?
Easy. A site can show a pop-up when the user clicks a link. Firefox detects it as a user-initiated pop-up and doesn't block it.
If you'd actually read the post, rather than seeing 'twitter' - FOAM, LATHER, PSYCHOSIS - you'd have seen that he said user actions make no difference against spam. Not viruses/malware/trojans.
From twitter's post:
"The false conclusion we are supposed to draw is that you can somehow be spam free if only you do this or that...."
Yes, he referred to antivirus software, but the only connection I saw was that antivirus vendors often include antispam features in their full Internet security products. Of course, this wasn't mentioned, but it's a safe assumption that most people on this board know that pretty much every antivirus vendor also makes an antispam product. And since this study was to do with spam, after all, it seems safe to not specifically mention the antispam product in the comments.
You, however, would rather go off on a foaming at the mouth, psychotic tirade as soon as you grep twitter anywhere close to a comment.
Thrown any chairs lately?
"I'm going to ****ing kill twitter!!!"
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
TinLC
For those not understandng this,
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/TINLC.html
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/L/Lumber-Cartel.html
1) While we joke about it, Nigerian scheme has a real life consequence and there are several people who has been kidnapped, threatened with a real gun, found themselves in a plot which a countries government involved. There is nothing technical about it, there are no MCafee products to stop a guy showing up your door with a real gun as they got your home address.
2) Worms/Viruses are all mafia type things run by real criminals who also has support from their governments and police. There is also terror network worm possibility. Your unprotected PC can be hosting the Al Queda sites for that month or some big pedophile network.
Will MCafee give these people some legal protection? Did they instruct these people well? Did they tell about the funny looking Nigerian mails background and what kind of people runs those schemes?