You could get rich, download nude pictures of celebrities, buy penny stocks or start your own business. That's what rachel_g_246@hotmail.com says. How the heck did she get your e-mail address? You, of course, are the victim of spam, unwanted e-mail sent in bulk to strangers, the moral equivalent in Internet culture of throwing spitballs.
When it comes via the postal service, you can usually trace junk mail back to some catalog purchase or magazine subscription. If you don't want it, you can tell the post office to stop sending it. But spam is a plague on those with e-mail addresses, as well as a burden on the bandwidth, disk space and server resources of Internet service providers. To combat it, an entire industry of antispam software vendors has emerged. But as soon as somebody figures out a way to filter the e-mail out, the spammers figure out a way to get around the filter.
Because sending spam is a semiunderground industry, actual revenue figures aren't to be found. But there sure is a lot of it. GartnerGroup, a consultancy in Stamford, Conn., says that 84 percent of Internet users have received spam. (Not surprisingly, 63 percent of the recipients say they "dislike it a lot," 20 percent "dislike it somewhat," 14 percent are neutral and only 3 percent like it in any way.)
Spam, a tacky marketing tool, seems to be used effectively by tacky businesses. A company called the International License Bureau, for example, based in Junction City, Kan. (although a call to the number listed on their e-mail reaches a telemarketer in Los Angeles), offers a multinational driver's license on a five-year contract for $50 a year, plus $10 a year toward the bureau's use of an issuing address in the Bahamas. The telemarketer, Bob Stevens, says the company not only spams, but advertises in the back of the National Enquirer.
As customers and Internet service providers have grown more irate, lawmakers have gotten busy, setting off a flurry of antispam legislation. Washington, California, Virginia and Nevada have all enacted laws regarding "commercial e-mail." Other legislation is pending in 18 states, and it's only a matter of time before a federal law is passed. GartnerGroup sounds the alarm: "If spam continues to grow at the current rate, if not exponentially, it may become an unmanageable issue. Customer ire is certain to increase with that onslaught, and ISPs will be faced with additional customer-service costs as they seek to control the flow of unwelcome e-mail while dealing with unhappy customers."
"We're not cockroaches crawling under the four corners of the carpet," says Brian Rasmus, president of Timely Products. "There are fly-by-nights in any industry, but we're very ethical and aboveboard. This is a nice business with low overhead." Timely Products specializes in mass e-mail, and is headquartered in a location Rasmus would not disclose. For $100, the company will send your marketing message to 100,000 addresses; Rasmus says he has 2 million addresses to choose from.
Timely Products is one of many companies devoted to making it easy for people to send spam. Some companies, including Timely Products, will do it all: Supply the e-mail addresses and send out the message. For do-it-yourselfers, there are vendors that sell the software to snag e-mail addresses off the Web; vendors that sell lists of e-mail addresses already "farmed"; vendors that sell software for sending out tons of e-mail at once.
A call to one of those spam ads touting bulk e-mail services reaches Paulann Anderson, proprietor of JetMail in northern Maine (she would not say which town). She's vacuuming, but she shuts off the machine to talk.
"I'm a one-woman business," she explains. "About three years ago, I participated in one of those multilevel marketing letters [via e-mail]. I learned how to get things mailed out and, in talking to the bulk e-mailers, I got interested in it. Once I made money on it, I decided to go into the
