business full time." Now, she's "smiling all the way to the bank," although she won't reveal specific details as to how profitable she is.
Anderson's business is fairly straightforward. For just $89, Anderson will electronically send a letter to 100,000 addresses - you write the letter and forward it to her, she takes care of the rest. For $165, your message goes to 200,000 people. Plus, on special this month, Anderson says, you get an additional 50,000 free mailings with every order. (The special does not apply to targeted mailing lists. The rate for shared demographic information is $250 for 100,000 addresses.)
It's clear that Anderson thinks she's talking with a customer, but when she finds out it's a journalist on the other end of the line, she slams down the phone. "I don't have time for this," she says before the click.
"Some people in this business make $30,000 a month," says James Whelan, CEO of a company called E-mail King and Associates, in Ontario, Canada. "They'll never make bulk e-mailing illegal. It's an effective means of marketing. I got 53 signups for a long-distance company [I was marketing for] in one week. Tell me that people don't like bulk e-mail. What gives it a bad name are the idiots who don't honor the 'remove-me' requests - and porn e-mail."
Whelan and Rasmus point out that people can reply and ask to be removed from their mailing lists. Other spammers, however, will forge their return addresses, so that when you hit reply, the message comes back to you. Still others direct you to a voice-mail box that's perpetually full. But the numbers are there in compliance with California, Washington and Virginia state laws that mandate such measures.
Rasmus claims ISPs aren't really upset about the traffic jams "bulk e-mailers" like himself create, but about the fact that e-mail marketing is an alternative to buying banner ads. Spam represents advertising revenue that the ISPs aren't getting. He insists this is why America Online (dossier) has so aggressively sued spammers and lobbied for antispam legislation. He also alleges that AOL is considering starting its own commercial e-mail service - a claim that AOL denies.
Why you? at some point, you may have unwittingly asked for spam. When you check a box on a Web-site registration form that says you'd like to get information on a topic, you've just "opted in," the term for agreeing to accept commercial e-mail. (Conversely, some Web sites consider you opted in if you neglect to check a box to specifically "opt out" of any promotional messages.)
The site operator can then sell your address to a mailing-list broker, opening the floodgates and making you fair game for anyone who puts together targeted and untargeted lists for sale. ISPs do not sell their Web addresses, because ISPs don't want to contribute to the spamming of their own customers.
But, chances are, you're just receiving e-mail from out of the blue, without signing up for anything. If a spammer doesn't want to buy a list from a list broker, he can buy spidering software from one of several major vendors or thousands of resellers. Vendors tend to use large numbers of resellers, sometimes in pyramid-scheme arrangements, to confuse and complicate trails to the source. Using a technique similar to that used by a search engine, the spidering software will search newsgroups and the Web, looking for the tell-tale signs of an e-mail address: the @ symbol and .com, .edu or .org within the same string of characters.
While the technology for spamming is not very expensive - Anderson says that buying software and tools runs about $1,500 - it still may be easier to use a third party, because spamming, while legal, is still something of a covert activity. A spammer must subscribe to a bulk-friendly ISP and probably juggle several accounts. The more you can make it look like you're not hogging traffic, the better.
