In a popularity contest among Net users, spammers would probably rank only slightly above child pornographers. Spam–unsolicited messages that make their way to your e-mail inbox with misleading subject lines and dubious propositions (from pyramid schemes to porno come-ons)–accounts for 30 to 50 percent of all e-mail traffic on the Net. Users are fed up, and big ISPs like AOL and Earthlink, increasingly overwhelmed by the excess traffic, are taking some spam operators to court. Meanwhile, vigilante anti-spam organizations like SpamCop are aggressively blacklisting spam operators and publishing their home and family information on the Web. Anti-spam sentiment has even evolved to the point where spammers themselves are feeling like victims, and are defending what they call an honest, legal living. Maryland e-mailer Alan Moore, also known as “Dr. Fat” for his herbal weight-loss pills, says spammers are “helping the economy and adding to the GNP. People need to realize this.”
Spam operations are often, by necessity, fly-by-night businesses. Bulk e-mailers gather addresses using “spambots” like the $179 Atomic Harvester, a piece of software that scours the Internet 24/7, vacuuming up addresses it encounters on bulletin boards and directories. Spammers often don’t charge clients anything up front, but will take 40 to 50 percent of the revenue an ad generates (or, with products like insurance, $7 a lead). Since most U.S. ISPs have policies that prohibit sending out spam, the majority of spammers operate by sending their messages to “blind” relays, computers in China, South Korea or Taiwan that redirect the e-mail and make it difficult to trace.
Recently, life has become more onerous for bulk e-mailers. Companies and ISPs are using new software to identify and stop spam as it comes into the network, before it gets distributed to individual inboxes. (This is why spam subject lines are now misleadingly banal or end in numbers: to trick the software, not you.) And with so many more marketing messages clogging Net accounts, users are increasingly inclined to hit the delete button when they see a piece of spam. One bulk e-mailer says that when she started spamming in 1999, she could send out 100,000 e-mails and get 25 responses. Today, she has to send out a million messages to get the same response (a .0025 percent hit rate).
While most spammers claim they’ve made hundreds of thousands–some even say millions–of dollars in past years by taking big cuts of their clients’ revenue, they’re tight-lipped about their current income. Spamhaus.org founder Steve Linford, whose anti-spam agents snoop on the e-mailers’ private online forums to stay on top of trends in the business, says there’s good reason: “We know they hardly make anything because they’re always complaining about it.” Several spam operations are also being threatened by litigation. For example, Al Ralsky has been sued in Virginia state court for allegedly sending millions of messages in mid-2000 that crashed the servers of Verizon Online. (His lawyer denies the charges.) The trial is set for this fall, but the judge in the Ralsky case has already ruled a spammer can be held liable in any state where his messages are received.
In a world where every niche industry speaks loudly to defend its interests, perhaps it’s not surprising that spammers are joining forces and trying to fight back. Thirty prolific e-mailers recently banded together in something called the Global E-mail Marketing Association (GEMA). The director, a southern California-based e-mailer who would like to be called “Tara,” says the purpose of GEMA is to regulate the industry and ensure its members abide by certain rules, such as allowing recipients to opt out of any list. She also wants to improve the public’s perception of spamming. First step: changing the name. “We are ‘commercial bulk e-mailers’, not spammers,” she says. “I would appreciate if NEWSWEEK would at least give us the dignity of that.”
Ronnie Scelson is another spammer showing defiance in the face of distaste for his profession. The 28-year-old father of three from Slidell, La., dropped out of high school in the ninth grade but says he’s made millions sending out 560 million e-mail messages a week, hawking everything from travel deals to lingerie. As a result, he drives a 2001 Corvette, and recently bought a five-bedroom home with a game room and pool. In May, the company Scelson founded, Opt-In Marketing, turned the tables and sued two ISPs and three anti-spam organizations in Civil District Court in New Orleans. The suit alleges that the ISPs, New Jersey-based CoVista and its Denver-based backbone provider Qwest, cut off his Internet access and denied his free-speech rights.
Scelson draws a distinction between his old profession, spamming, and his new one, bulk e-mailing: he says he currently allows people to take themselves off his lists and uses American ISPs to send e-mail instead of foreign relays. But spam is in the eye of the beholder, and recently one of his high-speed Internet lines was temporarily blocked by his new ISP. Now Scelson wonders aloud if playing by the rules is even worth it and threatens to return to his old ways. “I’m going back to spamming. I don’t care if I have to relay, work through a proxy or spoof an IP address, I’ll do it.”
Anti-spammers practically leak venom when it comes to addressing the bid for dignity made by their rivals. Julian Haight, the founder of SpamCop, says spammers deserve “every ounce of the image that they have… The correlation between spamming and rip-off deals is unreal.” Verizon exec Tom Daly says spam is insidious because it shifts the costs and burden of handling massive volumes of mail to the network providers. And Internet users: well, no one is exactly clamoring for more e-mail about get-rich-quick schemes or magical ways to enhance their you-know-what. For spammers (er, commercial bulk e-mailers), the quickest route to respectability may be to find another line of work altogether.
