I see why they had to shut it down, we can’t have unregulated propaganda running amuck.

What if someone like Assange had this ability to spam closely held secrets to the masses?

Pirate internet.

Confiscating the machines of the spammers is one thing and they
should have since the data on the machines is most likely a big
part of the problem as these machines are most likely the
residence of the zombies.  But that doesn’t mean all people’s
computers ought to be candidates for seizure.  It seems it is
limited to suspected spammers.

But no, I’ve never answered a spam not even once since it first
started. I’ve always been suspicious of emails from strange origins.
My spam checker is pretty good. It catches even mail from my cousins
and I have to retrieve them out of the junk file before trashing en mass
the pieces in the folder.  My computer learns when I move something
from Junk to Inbox.  Then the rest are sent to the trash bin and I delete
the trash folder contents forever.  But thanks for the warning.  I’ve
heard it can be a huge problem.  I’ve known for some long time about
spam targets.  I’ve been working computers since the early 80s.  The
government gets a forward of all spam or suspected spam that I get. 
A surprising number of them are in Arabic calligraphy or Chinese
characters.  I have a feeling that the government has some software
that sends up red flags if anything “of interest” shows up.  A lot of it
has to do with sending money to save some tribal chieftan or win a
trillion dollars on some nefarious moneymaking scheme.

Everyone needs to routinely dump without opening if possible all
obvious advertisements for anything that was unsolicited.  But it is still
a PIA even to have it come into the computer.  It is interesting that after
a while, it is noticeable that the spam stops.  Then months later it
starts again.  I think the spammers have a rotary set up that cycles
around periodically.

****************

Or, maybe mickymousesoft wants to see how they should build
their on botnet for future projects.

Shenonymous—I hope you aren’t sending email to apparent spammers.  Very little spam contains the actual email address of the sender.  Usually it’s just another target.

I too was surprised at the ‘Microsoft quickly seized’ line, but I recognize that reporters generally know little about the Internet (or anything else) and may have misunderstood whatever they were told by whatever flacks were sent to minister to their needs.  For all we know the bot-infected machines were in Microsoft’s own offices.

Horrraaaayyyy!  I send every spam email received to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
then junk mail them after that.  Must have sent 10,000 (an
exaggeration), but still, they are a PIA.  I have a spam checker but
there are many that slither through.  We will see if they become less
or even, hopefully disappear altogether.