We receive a lot of forwarded spam emails from people in the school. Here's an eye-opening experiment that should help you to remember to delete and empty trash rather than forwarding or replying. If you don't know them, ignore them!
And no, you're not getting an inheritance from someone in Nigeria, and that iPod is NOT free.
Remember to set your Junk Email filter. The Help file in Outlook will tell you how.
For Tracy Mooney, a married mother of three in Naperville, Ill., the decision to abandon cybersense and invite e-mail spam into her life for a month by participating in a McAfee Inc. experiment was a bit of a lark.The idea of McAfee's Global SPAM (for Spammed Persistently All Month) Experiment — which fittingly started on April Fool's Day — was to have 50 volunteers from 10 different countries answer every spam message and click on every pop-up ad on their PCs.What would happen if everyday people, armed with a PC and an e-mail account provided by McAfee did that? Mooney and the rest of the volunteers chronicled the results in the Global SPAM Diaries.Mooney — who had observed her family's PC crippled just before Christmas by a virus — was game, especially because McAfee was giving free PCs to all participants. McAfee selected her and the other 50 volunteers from a field 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 real estate agent 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."On Tuesday, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based vendor of IT security products released the results of its free-wheeling month-long experiment, which was undertaken largely to illustrate — if you hadn't guessed already — how spam is connected to malware and criminal activity, not to mention some of the slimiest marketing ever devised.
Each SPAM 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 SPAM adventure — answered every single message.
The spammed life of Penelope RetchIn her guise as Penelope Retch, Mooney dutifully answered all of the e-mail that came into her account. "I'd see an interactive spam, open it, click on it and ask to be removed. That would only make it worse," she says. "They'd say no."
Whether she was trying to win an iPod online or get free travel brochures, weight-loss tea or Maybelline eyeliner, Mooney found that the effect of entering a home address was extreme. Immediately, a deluge of mail would land 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 postal carrier 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 that took her to fake Web sites for Wells Fargo and other banks. She sat back as the supposed government of Nigeria sought to give her an inheritance, and she watched a foreign IP address go after a dummy PayPal account that had been set up as part of the SPAM experiment.
The most obvious result of the 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 people from each of 10 countries for the SPAM experiment, the five U.S. participants received the most spam: 23,233 spam messages over the course of the month.Brazil and Italy were in the 15,000-plus category, and Mexico and the U.K. above 10,000. Australia, the Netherlands and Spain were in the 5000 to 9000-plus range. The SPAM volunteers in France and Germany got the least spam, less than 3,000 messages for the month. McAfee didn't include what it calls "gray 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 messages received by the U.S. participants. In general, spam appears to still largely be delivered in English. French- and German-language messages were the only non-English spam to amount to more than 10% of spam received by the participants in France and Germany respectively.
Among the oddball facts that emerged was the finding that come-ons to a fake Chase.com site represented the most common phishing e-mail spotted during the project, and that the British volunteers received the most Nigerian scam e-mail.
In addition to Mooney, the other SPAM participants also kept blogs about the experience, which some found amusing and others disturbing. A participant in Australia named Marika wrote, "I don't know whether I would feel safe to surf to that extent again. I tried to sign up for jobs that would generate an at-home income with what seemed like respectable sites, however these sites led to massive amounts of spam."
Diary of a deliberately spammed housewife
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