May 7, 1998
By AMY HARMONHINO, 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.
Credit: Kim Kulish for The New York TimesSpammer
Name Damien Melle, 22.
Occupation Commercial bulk e-mailer.
Spams sent Roughly 15 million a month.
Internet accounts canceled More than 100—about 5 to 8 times a month.
Philosophy of spam "I made a lot of money last month. I'll never work for a big company again. The Internet is an opportunity for people like us."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@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.
Is it (a) the end of civilization or (b) a triumph of free enterprise?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!"
hat'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."
Credit: Peter DaSilva for The New York TimesAnti-Spammer
Name Paul Vixie, 34.
Occupation Programmer and administrator of Realtime Black Hole List.
Spams received Roughly 600 a month.
Spammers silenced (if only for a while) About 75.
Philosophy of spam "This is just not O.K. with me. All Internet communications should be consensual."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.
Trappings of a cyberwar: from virtual mail bombs to real boycotts.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.' "
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