Spam

[Steve Hoffman]

The American Way of Spam

Amy Harmon
NY Times 5/8/98


CHINO, Calif. -- The life of a spammer is no bowl of cybercherries.
Damien Melle, who makes a living sending huge amounts of e-mail
advertising over the Internet, works out of his home in this
hardscrabble Southern California suburb, in an office where the smell
of fried food lingers like, say, unwanted e-mail in your In box. 

On a recent afternoon, he fielded half a dozen hate calls. His
Internet service provider canceled his account, again. And another
Federal Express letter arrived from America Online's lawyers. They
had subpoenaed his laptop from the shop where it was in for repairs. 

On the bright side, no dog feces had come in the mail, as has
happened at least once, and the anti-spammer vigilantes who had been
tracking him seemed to have lost the scent somewhere in the ether.
There was also the tally of the previous month's profits on the white
board, the only wall covering except for a picture of the Virgin
Mary. In March, Melle said, his company, which he runs with his
brother Joe, cleared about $11,000. "I made a lot of money last
month, and I was at home," said Melle, 22, who manages, despite his
travails, to make a daily delivery of about a half-million e-mail
promotions. 

"I'll never work for a big company again. The Internet is an
opportunity for people like us. That's why the big companies are
nervous." Joe Melle, 31, who runs his part of the operation from
Norristown, Pa., said, "We're just trying to put food on the table." 

The brothers Melle are on the front lines of the spam wars,
cyberspace's first all-out internecine conflict. Depending on which
side you talk to, the stakes are, roughly, the future of capitalism,
free expression and the American Way or the future of the Internet,
individual privacy and the American Way. 

"One of us has got to go off this Net, and it ain't going to be me,"
said Ron Guilmette, a software engineer in Sacramento, Calif., who is
developing a program to block spam. 

Like many aspiring electronic entrepreneurs, the Melles started a few
years back by culling addresses by hand from the Web and e-mail
discussion groups. Now computer programs with unrepentant names like
Cyber Bomber and Stealth Mass Mailer help thousands of spammers keep
their self-appointed rounds, with relative anonymity to boot. 

As a result, it has become essentially impossible to overstate just
how much various Internet factions abhor those who send junk e-mail
(although many are happy to try). 

Internet access providers whose systems are clogged with commercial
mail blame the spammers for slowing down the whole system.
Subscribers revile them for sullying their mailboxes, and those of
their Net-loving children, with offers of free hot sex, XXX photos,
discount dental plans and tips on how they, too, might partake of the
bulk-mail bounty from outfits like Money4you at dreamscometrue.com. 

The war even has its own language. Spammers spoof headers (to hide
their real e-mail addresses), relay-rape overseas mail servers
(routing their mail through an unsuspecting computer to avoid making
their service providers suspicious) and shield their computers'
whereabouts with cloaking programs. 

Anti-spammers retaliate with mail bombs (barraging their antagonists
with a taste of their own medicine), computer code patches for
security holes and the formidable Real-Time Black Hole List, part of
a boycott campaign of providers who service known spammers. 

On the Spam-L list-serve, an online bastion of the spam-haters,
members know their quarry by name: "Alex Chiu is back," one wrote. 

"Nuke him." (In an interview, the beleaguered Chiu, 27, said he had
quit his job at a duty-free shop in San Francisco to market an
anti-aging device he had invented. Now he sends out mail for clients,
too, including sex-toy stores and individuals offering do-it-yourself
business plans. Among his reasons for turning to spam: "I'm an
environmentalist." Spam, of course, wastes no paper.) 

Another spammer, Dan Hufnal, head of the Direct E-Mail Advertisers
Association, said: "These people will go to any means to punish any
company that would advertise this way or provide the connectivity for
others who wish to do so. They're nothing short of terrorists. They
don't act any different from the I.R.A." 

Hufnal's attempts to provide Internet access for bulk e-mailers have
been thwarted by a group of network engineers who identify spammers
and shut them out of much of the Net. 

Both sides display a tendency toward hyperbole that seems endemic to
their chosen medium. But spam is a genuinely troubling flash point
for so many because it lays bare both the pros and cons of the
Internet's unique brand of democratic expression. 

The network's much-celebrated capacity to turn anyone with
$20-a-month access into a publisher or entrepreneur is also what
allows spammers to thrive. Yet anti-spam activists, or
"anti-E-commerce radicals," as Hufnal calls them, insist that it is
bulk e-mail itself that endangers electronic free speech. For proof,
they point to the spam siege of Usenet, a portion of the Internet
devoted to public bulletin boards where thousands of subjects are
discussed. 

Usenet newsgroups were the target of two notorious spam pioneers,
Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, immigration lawyers who in 1994
posted vast numbers of messages offering assistance in entering the
green card lottery. Despite the efforts of software known as
cancelbots and human "despammers," many of the newsgroups have since
been overrun with junk messages. 

"As someone who is very concerned with free speech on the Net, it
certainly makes me anxious that this is the way the market is
developing," said Dierdre Mulligan, staff counsel for the Center for
Democracy and Technology, a public-interest group, and author of a
report by the Federal Trade Commission's working group on spam that
is scheduled for release this week. "But as someone who received
three unsolicited political e-mails and 22 commercial e-mails today, I
think the more we can let people tailor what they want to receive,
the better." 

The term spam, taken from the name of the spiced lunch meat
relentlessly doled out in Army rations, morphed into an epithet when
Internet denizens adopted it to refer to unsolicited promotional
messages. So negative is the connotation that Hormel Foods, which
holds the trademark for Spam, sent a cease-and-desist letter to one
publicity-minded spammer who held a press conference surrounded by
cans of the pink product. 

Less clear is whether spam is universally undesirable or whether, as
one spammer puts it, "one man's spam is another man's caviar." Junk
e-mail's bad rap is largely due to its tendency to promote
get-rich-quick schemes or pornographic Web sites. But there are
already laws governing e-mail that is fraudulent or obscene. Spammers
marketing legitimate products -- they prefer to be called bulk
e-mailers -- insist that there are plenty of people who welcome their
missives. Or how would they be making money? 

Joel Theodore, 31, of Long Island, who promotes his company's
computer systems via e-mail, responded to an Internet posting titled,
"Repent, sinner!" by writing: "The truth is, most businesses are not
repenting merely because of the fact that it is profitable. The
reality is we are not just irresponsible people. We have done our
best to target mail. We also have made sure no one will ever get
another one if they do not want it. We also do not use any illegal
practices. If you don't want to read it, hit delete!" 

That's easy to say, retort the anti-spammers -- they prefer to be
called pro-privacy advocates -- but consider the following: "If a
spammer sends a million pieces of e-mail out for a worthless piece of
merchandise, that means a million people are going to have to delete
the e-mail or respond to it," said Jim Nitchals, a regular on the
net-abuse.email Internet discussion group. "Add up the number of
seconds, and we're talking days and months of human suffering and
waste of energy and time." 

And cash. Since it costs spammers about the same to send 10 million
pieces of mail as it does to send 10, there is no natural barrier to
entry. And unlike junk snail mail, spam haters contend, e-mail passes
on the cost of the advertisement to the providers who transmit it and
recipients who pay for connect time to download it. America Online,
for instance, estimates that as much as 30 percent of the all the
Internet mail it processes is junk mail, at a cost that may eventually
pass on to users. 

The nation's biggest on-line service, AOL, whose subscribers suffer
the indignities of spam perhaps more than anyone else, has won
several recent court victories over junk e-mailers, prohibiting them
from sending unsolicited bulk e-mail to the service. The Melles are
next on AOL's list. In a suit filed in Federal District Court in
Alexandria, Va., AOL is seeking an injunction against the Melles'
company, TSF Marketing, which earlier this year threatened to make
public five million AOL subscriber addresses unless the company
relaxed its restrictions on bulk mailers. 

But spammers are fond of pointing out that AOL itself bombards users
with infuriating pop-up advertisements touting such offers as "easy
1-step photo scanning" every time they log on. And as mainstream
advertisers and nonprofit and political organizations contemplate
using bulk e-mail as a way to get their messages out, just what
qualifies as spam becomes increasingly murky. The Democratic Party in
California, for instance, plans to send e-mail to thousands of voters
with a slate of endorsements and information on the party's
candidates this year. 

"It's hard to get a fixed definition of spam," Mulligan said. "You
know it when you see it." 

The war on spam is making an impact. Many Internet service providers
have adopted subscriber contracts that prohibit sending bulk e-mail,
and even "bulk friendly" providers have been hounded into changing
their policies. Sanford Wallace, known as the Spam King -- at his
peak, he was sending 25 million pieces of mail a day -- said last
month that he was retiring from the trade. 

Now Congress is considering three anti-spam bills, one of which would
hold junk e-mail to the same standard as junk faxes. Courts have
found some spammers liable for trespassing, and Internet users are
adopting a host of new technological defenses. The new version of
Microsoft's e-mail software, for instance, includes a feature --
based on an analysis of 2,000 pieces of spam -- that automatically
blocks messages containing phrases like "for free!" or whose subject
line contains both an exclamation point and a question mark. 

Such measures do not impress Paul Vixie, the administrator of the
Realtime Black Hole List, into which spammers have been known to
disappear forever. Vixie, who wrote one of the programs that makes the
Internet run, remembers the days when the network was spam-free. Now
he gets spam about 100 times a day. So he is fighting back. 

With a posse of volunteers, Vixie tracks each piece of junk mail he
receives to its source -- or as close as he can get. He then informs
the spammer's service provider that it is harboring a Net
transgressor. The provider has a choice: ditch the spammer or suffer
the consequences. If a provider fails to take action, it is dropped
into the abyss of the Black Hole List, which means that none of its
subscribers can send e-mail to other providers who support Vixie's
efforts. Vixie estimates that about one-fifth of the service
providers on the Net support such e-mail boycotts. 

"See, it's raising the hair on the back of my neck," he told a
visitor recently as he hunched over his computer in his Silicon
Valley office and stalked his prey. "This is just not O.K. with me.
Fundamentally, this is an abuse of a privilege. All Internet
communications should be consensual." 

The Black Hole List maintainers realize that their tactics punish
some innocent victims. But they are adamant about their right to
refuse traffic from any Internet providers friendly to spam. 

"It's heartbreaking for me to get e-mail from somebody's mother who
can't send mail to her son at college because the school subscribes
to the Black Hole List," Vixie said. "But I write them back and say:
'I'm sorry you're being inconvenienced. But your provider is spamming
me. And they won't stop.' " 

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company




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