Diary of a deliberately spammed housewife

Network World - 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. (Compare antispam products.)

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 Retch

In 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."