the secure:channel

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Internet.com had an article today titled “Begging to be Spammed“, the subject of which may be obvious. It’s about McAfee’s “The s.p.a.m. experiment“, where McAfee has recruited volunteers from ten different countries to subscribe to spam.

The s.p.a.m. acronym stands for “spammed persistenly all month”, which is cute, and probably a good reflection of the seriousness of the test.

Reading the blogs for the U.S. volunteers gives some insight into the lack of direction of the project. The volunteers appear to be purposely requesting as much commerical e-mail as they can. My definition of spam has always been unsolicited bulk e-mail. If you ask for the e-mail by giving your information to a web site with a loose privacy policy, you’re getting solicited e-mail regardless of whether it is bulk or commercial.

Although I’ve written an article saying that some spammers do actually set up web sites to harvest e-mail address by offering something of perceived value for free, it’s unlikely that the volunteers will have sufficient experience to be able to target these sites.

The Internet.com article goes on to say that for the next step of the project the volunteers will be given credit cards to make purchases from the offers that they’re getting by e-mail. If they actually are getting spam, do they really think that fueling the spam industry is a good idea?

I doubt that that McAfee’s researchers will have much useful data at the end of the experiment, but it sounds like a fun social experiment. It’s likely just a marketing ploy, which seems to be working. Here I am blogging about it, and giving them some free word of mouth.