SPAMBUSTERS

Author(s): Neil Swidey

Date: October 5, 2003

Page: 12

Section: Magazine

Laurence
Canter leans forward, scrunches up his sunburned nose, and says with a smile,
``I don't know - do I seem that evil to you?'' Then he holds out his palms and
shrugs. He's a slight guy, ``5-foot-9 on a good day,'' as he puts it, with a
round face and a receding hairline. He's wearing a floral-print knit shirt,
jeans, and sneakers. He's sipping a glass of pinot grigio.
He looks about as menacing as the recording secretary of the local Kiwanis club.
But in 1994, Canter was the most loathed and feared man on the Internet.

Canter and
his wife at the time, Martha Siegel, were immigration lawyers in Phoenix. When
the US Immigration and Naturalization Service announced it would hold a lottery
for green cards, Canter saw a different kind of green. The Internet was then
still something of a techie country club, open mainly to academics and computer
engineers. Canter had always been a closet techie, and he figured the Net would
be a good place to find well-educated, well-paid immigrants who were looking
for permission to stay in this country. It didn't matter that applying for the
green card lottery was free - hey, so is filing your income taxes, but look how
many guys charge people to file theirs. So Canter put together his message
offering to enter immigrants in the lottery for $95 apiece. Then he posted it
on a couple of Usenet newsgroups, those themed electronic discussion forums.
When that pitch brought in a few clients, he decided to expand his reach. On
April 12, 1994, Canter found a way to blast his ad to every newsgroup that
Usenet had to offer, more than 6,000 in all. With that one move, he incurred
the wrath of techies everywhere. They were alarmed that Canter had brought
crass commercialism into their country club and were convinced that if he
wasn't stopped, Canter would turn it into a junkyard. But his blast worked: He
calculates that it brought in almost $100,000 in revenue, with almost no outlay
on his end. More important, it secured his place in Internet history. Others
before him had dabbled in this kind of electronic marketing, but no one had yet
harnessed the new medium for all its mass-distribution, shameless-promotion
potential. Laurence Canter is the father of modern spam.

Fast-forward
to 2003. The country club is, if not a junkyard, then
at the very least a public park so crowded as to be almost impassable. It has
unspeakably filthy toilets and depraved hucksters hovering over every park
bench and near every kiddie pool, peddling everything
from herbal Viagra to bestiality peep-show passes. Parents are becoming afraid
to let their kids anywhere near it.

The spam
statistics get starker by the day. More than half of all e-mail is now spam. Spam is believed to be costing business $10 billion
a year in lost productivity. More than half the states now have some kind of
anti-spam law on the books, but the efforts have been hobbled by powerful
lobbies, enforcement problems, and a lack of consensus about just what
constitutes spam. And as much as the incessant come-ons have us all fuming at
our screens, we don't know the half of it. Many corporate networks and Internet
service providers, or ISPs, now run filters that block most spam before it gets
to our desktops. AOL alone fends off about 2 billion spam messages every day.
Still, as any AOL user will tell you, despite all the bluster about cracking
down on spam, or maybe because of it, the junk is proliferating like never before. It has surged rapaciously
in the last six months.

Can spam be
stopped before it chokes e-mail to death? How long before a
critical mass of the public, unwilling to withstand the daily assault, simply
stops using e-mail?

The
low-level fighting between techies
and spammers that followed Canter's original blast has erupted into a
full-scale war. And the most interesting dimension of the battle against spam
is the manifold brigade of warriors now assembled to fight it. The group
includes programmers and profiteers, litigators and legislators, law-enforcing
scolds and law-breaking vigilantes. They have almost nothing in common besides
their shared hatred of spammers and their evangelical insistence that they will
triumph. About the only way to cool their fervor is to hit them with this
reality check: Right now, rather than devising tomorrow's Web, many of the best
minds in technology are spending their days trying to save the current one from
ruin at the hands of a band of college dropouts pushing printer-cartridge
refills and penis-enlargement pills. And they're losing. Badly.

A line of
glasses stuffed with cutlery runs along the center of Paul Graham's dining room
table. Graham didn't like running to the kitchen every time he needed a fork.
"Designed for efficiency," he says. The same could be said of his
entire $2 million mansard-roofed home that sits just outside Harvard Square. To
buy the place, he dipped into his share of the $49 million payday he and two
partners got in 1998 when Yahoo! purchased their start-up, Viaweb,
and turned it into the Yahoo! Store. These days, the sandy-haired, youthful
38-year-old Graham is living the life.

Making
arrangements to meet him, I suggest a 10 a.m. interview. "Ten is a little
early," he replies. When I arrive at 11 the next morning, Graham, dressed
in khaki shorts and a short-sleeve pullover, shows me around his
quirky-while-classy three-story bachelor pad as his architect stands nearby
plotting the next phase of the rolling remodeling effort. The decor includes 90
colorful antique potato mashers, an arresting floor-to-ceiling oil painting of
a female nude by Richard Maury, and a doormat emblazoned with the words
"Hi. I'm Mat."

For Graham,
spam is the definition of inefficiency. It wastes money, bandwidth, and, lately,
pretty much most of his time.

He came to
spam by way of Arc, a new computer programming language he is designing. To
test it, Graham decided to create a new e-mail program and spam filter. He began
with a "rules-based" filter, in which computers are fed instructions
such as "Don't accept any e-mail messages containing the word
`Viagra.' " But Graham soon realized why
rules-based filters don't work: They're made for a static world, and spam is
downright dynamic. By the time computers have been taught the Viagra rule,
spammers have already moved on to alternate spellings of the potency pill, for
instance, subbing the "i" with the numeral
"1."

Then one
day in the summer of 2002, Graham had his eureka moment. What if he could
outsmart spammers by devising a filter based on Bayes's
Rule? Named after the 18th-century British minister/mathematician Thomas Bayes, the theorem provides a way of determining
probability by combining evidence. If an e-mail containing
the word "Viagra" has a 96 percent probability of being spam, and one
containing the words "credit card" has a 97 percent probability,
what's the likelihood that one that contained both would be spam? Bayes's Rule figures that out.

Graham
quickly designed his Bayesian filter, set up a bunch of "honey pots"
- Hotmail and Yahoo! e-mail addresses designed for the sole
purpose of attracting spam - and then watched his in-box clog up like the
Central Artery on a Friday afternoon. To his surprise, he found that his new
program filtered out all but five out of every 1,000 pieces of spam he was sent
and had no "false positives" - those pieces of "good" mail a filter mistakenly treats as
trash. Also to his surprise: He found that the words "rake" and
"dime" have a much higher probability of being spam than
"porn," mainly because they're so uncommon in legitimate e-mail and so prevalent in all that "RAKE IT IN! WON'T COST YOU
A DIME !!" strike-it-rich spam.
("Viagra" has a relatively low spam probability for Graham because
his programmer friends are always mentioning it as a filtering example in the e-mails they send him.)

When he
broadcast his "Plan for Spam" on the Web, Graham single-handedly
revived the tech world's interest in filtering as a spam solution. The best
part about a Bayesian filter is that, if you train it correctly - and it does
take a little technical know-how - the filter gets smarter as you go along,
watching what you consider spam and modeling your decision making. Graham, who
organized a spam-fighting
conference at MIT earlier this year and is planning another for January, is
convinced that he and the many others who have followed his Bayesian lead now
have spam on the run. He's especially pleased with this summer's decision by
AOL, that ultimate spam magnet, to install a new "adaptive" filter
that sounds decidedly Bayesian. "This could be the beginning of the
end," Graham says, more than a little triumphantly.

Meanwhile,
instead of refining his new computer language, Graham finds himself obsessed
with perfecting his spam filter. Right now, he's trying hard to find a way to
block a new breed of spam, which is muted and conversational and looks a lot
more like the e-mail you get from your sister than
from any sinister spammer. These messages are often addressed to you by name
and say something like, "Here are those pictures from my vacation that I
told you about." (If you click on the link, you'll learn that they're not
vacation photos at all - or that you don't know your sister as well as you
thought.)

"I
can't catch that yet," Graham concedes. But, he wonders, how profitable
can spam be if it's so understated as to almost forget to push the product?
"How do you suggest to someone that their penis is going to be enlarged
without using the words `penis' or `enlarge'?" Graham asks. No matter,
he's determined to beat it. Many of the 580 people who came to his MITconference are working on their own filters, and Graham
is hearing footsteps. These guys - there aren't many women to be found in this
fight - tend to have a commission salesman's obsession with keeping track of
everyone else's numbers, in their case, the percentage of spam a particular
filter catches. Graham says his now clocks in around 99.7 percent. About one
colleague/competitor, he confides, "I'm pretty sure he's going to pass me
this year.", Staying ahead of spammers and his
fellow programmers is this dot-com millionaire's fuel. I ask Graham why he
didn't try to cash in and sell his anti-spam armor. He squints
his blue eyes and says, "Oh, no, I'm retired. How much money do you really
need, right?"

JUST WHAT IS SPAM, AND IS IT
ILLEGAL? To some
extent, that depends on who you are and how it gets to you.

The states
that passed anti-spam laws (Massachusetts is not yet one of them) have
generally defined spam as "unsolicited bulk e-mail" or
"unsolicited e-mail" or a combination of the the two. (The fdefinition would
include electronic begging from the red cross or your
state representative, the second would include an advance-showing alert from an
exclusive art gallery.) but no state besides delaware has made spam itself illegal. to
break the law elsewhere, spammers have to commit some kind of fraud, such as
making it look as though their fly-by-nightre-fi! offer is coming from your longstanding local bank, or they
have to fail to put some kind of label like ``adv'' in the subject line. even then, few of the laws are robustly enforced.

But, to
paraphrase US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's line about pornography, we
all know spam when we see it.

Lately, few
people see as much of it as Sean True. Day and night,
stationed in front of his computer, server, and three monitors in his Natick
office, True wades through some of the slimiest, grimiest, and most tedious of
Web commerce. Because his office also happens to be his home, his work
on the wild side often takes place while his wife, two teenage sons, and dog
are sitting in the next room.

"I was
a much happier guy before I started doing this," says the 48-year-old
True, wearing rumpled shorts and guzzling coffee. But it's all for a good
cause. True has about 30,000 pieces of spam in his archive, and he adds to it
every day.

Early this
year, True and two of his co-workers at a speech-recognition company launched
their own start-up, called Audiotrieve. If the company name fails to suggest any connection to anti-spam
software, that's because it had none when they founded it. Their
original plan was to create software that would enable fast, full-text Web
searching of all kinds of audio and video that are
currently inaccessible to Google and other search engines. But in his free
time, True started tinkering with his own spam filter.

He began in
the "open source" community - the programmer's version of a lending
library - where he found lots of code for Bayes ian filtering that other tech ies had written after Graham issued his call to arms. From
there, True lev eraged his speech-recognition expertise to try to get his
spam filter to "learn" faster. That's important, because there is no
universal, Potter Stewart-satisfying definition of spam. An unsolicited
enticement for cheap cigarettes is destined to be deleted by most of us, but to
heavy smokers it could be a ticket to more discretionary income. With a
Bayesian filter, if you like getting spam messages for smokes, they'll keep
coming.

Then True
and his partners made the obvious decision: In a relentless recession that is
particularly unforgiving to the high-tech sector, spam-fighting is one of the few growth areas. They would put their
multimedia search software on hold and get a spam-stopper on the market as soon
as possible.

Since July,
they've sold about 1,000 copies of their new $24.95 product, which is called InBoxer. The reviews have been positive. To continue
refining the filter, True must feed it a steady diet of new spam. He says he
knows some programmers are content to share their secrets for free, but he
feels that he and his partners can do well while doing good. Still, he won't
forget all their open-source help. "There are people in that community
that I owe serious cases of beer to when we become insanely successful,"
he says.

True and
his partners are bringing a good product to people who want it. But they are
just bit players in what is fast becoming a boom industry. The market for anti-spam
solutions will grow to $2.4 billion over the next four years, according to The Radicati Group, a market research firm in Palo Alto,
California.

All of
which prompts a question: Is spam-fighting
becoming so big a business as to, in fact, discourage the end of spam?

"The
development of anti-spam software is not a good story," says Barry Shein, who runs the Brookline-based Internet serv ice provider The World. "It's like hearing
locksmiths and barbed-wire salesmen are moving into your neighborhood."
Moreover, as a member of numerous committees charged with creating new Internet
stand ards in light of the spam problem, Shein says, he occasionally gets suspicious that "some
of the people around the table who are being argumentative and disruptive might
have a vested interest in making money off spam. They've become the barbed-wire
salesmen."

Shein is
a tall, avuncular 50-year-old with a low, guttural voice, a gray goatee that he
rubs often, and long wisps of gray hair that extend from his eyebrows. He spins
a good yarn, and, when it comes to issues of the Internet, he has an
incomparable perspective. That's because he was the first guy in the world to
offer the general public dial-up access to the Internet. Back in 1989, before
AOL, before Prodigy, there was Barry Shein, hooking
up customers to the Internet from his second-floor office in the Tudor
clock-tower building in Coolidge Corner.

Remarkably,
he's still doing the same thing today, from the same cluttered office. He's
proud of his longevity. But the clock may be about to stop. "To be
honest," he says, "I don't know how much longer I'll be in this
business."

He feels
thoroughly beaten down by the costs and pressures of doing hand-to-hand combat
with spammers - Shein alternately calls them "scum
bags" and "organized crime" - while mollifying his now fewer
than 10,000 subscribers, many of whom blame him when their 9-year-old sons find
porn offers in their e-mail in-boxes. Says Shein, "It's become like licking toilets for a
living."

In any accounting
of spam's unwitting victims, the good people of Hormel have to rank somewhere
near the top. True, their salty, watery canned pork product did not exactly
have the reputation of beluga caviar before its name was hijacked by junk e-mail. But they
really did nothing to deserve this bad rap.

Monty
Python got them into this mess - or, more precisely, those early techies who
had memorized the lines to the British comedy troupe's act. In one classic skit
from a 1970 episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus, a waitress rattles off the
contents of a menu in which all the items contain Spam - much to the distress
of the customer seated in front of her. As she does this, she is repeatedly
drowned out by a table of helmeted Vikings who sing, "Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam!
Lovely Spam! Wonderful Spam!" For the techies,
that perfectly captured the essence of relentless, annoying, repetitious,
unwanted electronic solicitation. For a time after Laurence Canter's green card
lottery postings, when the spam moniker really started to catch on, Hormel
tried to squash it before eventually bowing to reality. But in July, Hormel
found its new frustration point and filed a legal challenge with the US Patent
and Trademark Office to prevent SpamArrest, a small
Seattle-based maker of anti-spam software, from trademarking
its name.

The
courtroom has become an increasingly popular front in the spam wars. From
Microsoft to Amazon, Earthlink to AOL, just about every tech heavyweight seems
to be getting into the act these days, suing scores of spammers, usually
alleging some kind of fraud.

Jon Praed is a Yale Law School graduate who used to work on
Capitol Hill. Six years ago, while he was employed by a big, venerable
Washington, D.C., law firm, he entered the seedy world of spam when he represented
AOL in its effort to go after a junk
e-mailer. Praed
hasn't left it since.

In fact,
the 39-year-old now runs a boutique law firm in Arlington, Virginia, that is
focused exclusively on Internet litigation, with AOL his most prominent client.
Praed is now part lawyer, part private detective, and
part forensic scientist.

These days,
few spammers do their spamming in plain view. The pressures from Internet
service providers, Web-hosting services, and the general public are so strong
that a good chunk of the senders of widespread spam are shut down within 24
hours. So companies that rely on spamming insulate themselves. For example,
many porn sites enlist "affiliates." These freelancers often use
cheap "harvesting" software to scrape the Web for millions of e-mail addresses and then blast spam to as many addresses as they
can find, directing the recipients to their personal websites, which are, in
turn, conduits to the original porn sites.

Sure, the
freelancers' personal sites will quickly get shut down, but even if only a tiny
percentage of people respond to the spam and only a couple end up paying for a
membership to the porn site, the maneuver will have paid off. (Porn sites often
pay affiliates more in commission than the sites collect from a new membership,
because they assume the new customer will stay around for a while, and they can
immediately sell that e-mail address to other porn sites for a
premium.)

As the
noose has tightened around spammers, their arrangements have become even more layered
and foggy, involving forged or hijacked computer addresses and Web-hosting
services in China and Eastern Europe. So Praed's
detective work has become more complicated.

But
spamming is all about making money, and at some point spammers have to reveal
enough about themselves to collect their cash. Praed
follows the money. Once he's locked onto his prey, he uses subpoenas,
injunctions, and every other costly legal tool he can find to teach spammers
that their work doesn't pay. "Spamming only survives because it pushes the
costs onto innocent third parties," he says. "When those innocent
parties can find a mechanism to push some of those costs back onto spammers, it
has a big effect."

He says he's
sued dozens of spammers and has yet to lose in court, though he sometimes
agrees to settle. "In the end," he says, "you get to take their
stuff."

Still,
there are far too many spammers and far too much opportunity for obfuscation to
make litigation a viable solution, at least on its own. (Also, many spammers
are located in Florida - Boca Raton is considered the spamming capital of the
world - where the laws allow for maximum protection of assets.) That's where
legislation comes in. Here again, however, the news is not too promising,
despite all the states that have anti-spam laws and the momentum building for
the passage of one on the federal level.

David E. Sorkin,
an associate professor of law at The John Marshall Law School in Chicago, has
been tracking anti-spam legislation across the country since 1996. His
exhaustive website, spamlaws.com, is a testament to both how
much politicians now recognize the potency of the public's anger over
spam and their nearly uniform per form ance in
yielding to powerful lobbyists to make sure that only the mildest - and largely
unenforceable - anti-spam laws pass.

After years
of seeing anti-spam laws die in Congress, Sorkin
says, "This year it seems quite possible that one of them will pass."
But that won't necessarily be an achievement. "A bad spam law is worse
than none at all," he says. Think about it: One of the few constraints on
spam right now is the stigma of seediness attached to it. If Congress enacts
legislation that prohibits only the most egregious spammers, it could become a
green light for mainstream businesses, silenced by the new National Do Not Call
Registry, to start spamming you on a weekly, or daily, basis.

For those
anti-spammers who can't wait for the wheels of justice to turn or for all the
wheeling and dealing on Capitol Hill to wind down, there is another route:
vigilantism. This category of warrior is a broad one, ranging from the
relatively mild free agents to the shadowy lawbreakers. Some create blacklists
(also called blocklists) of known spammers and share
them with ISPs and corporate networks, so that e-mail coming from
those sources is automatically blocked. Among these blacklisters,
some are careful in their research and responsive to complaints from the
wrongly accused. Others create their lists capriciously, providing no mechanism
for getting off and penalizing lots of legitimate businesses that simply have
the misfortune of getting their Web-hosting from a service that also happens to
host a spammer. (Spammers have begun fighting
back, using other computers as "Trojan horses" to overload the blacklisters' systems.)

Then there
are the hard-core hackers, who believe the only way to beat spammers is to play
as dirty as they do. Given their lawbreaking ways, they do this anonymously.
But many have become folk heroes on the Web, such as the hacker who
"flamed" a spamming company by getting all its phones to ring
incessantly.

The
catalogs started coming in the mail
by the bushel. "Here's the information you requested," they said, except
Minh Nguyen never recalled requesting any of them. Then his company's voice mail started getting clogged. Finally,
the junk e-mail started
coming in by the thousands, shutting down his computer system.

A victim of spam? Actually, Nguyen was a victim of anti-spam. He was a "bulk e-mailer," the term spammers
prefer. Through his Framingham company, One Source
Computer Corp., Nguyen set up a half-dozen websites, notably
bestcheapstuff.com, and sold printer cartridges and other products. He paid a
marketing company for a list of 20 million e-mail addresses
and began sending out messages to drive traffic to his sites.

Then he ran
into the anti-spam vigilantes. They put his sites on blacklists. They flooded
his ISP with complaints until it dropped his service, and when they found out
which ISP he was going to use next, they did the same there. He got his lawyer
to send cease-and-desist letters to as many of the vigilantes and black list ers as he could find. The vigilantes countered by creating
a website about his lawyer, featuring her photograph and as much of her
personal information as they could gather.

After a
while, Nguyen gave up. "It was too much of a headache," he says.

Score one
for the anti-spam crowd, right? Not exactly. Nguyen is
still in the bulk e-mailing business. "Because of the
hassle we ran into," the 43-year-old explains, "we decided we were
just going to outsource." Nguyen says he now pays a company called Virtumundo and a few other firms to send out his bulk e-mails. The Kansas City-based Virtumundo,
which is wholly owned by a 23-year-old who started the company as a college
student, boasts that it has 60 million e-mail addresses of users who have
"opted in" to receive e-mail solicitation. It is a stunning
figure, given that there are only about 100 million American users on the
Internet nowadays, and many of them would seem to belong to the
Do-Not-Call-registering, spam-hating, leave-me-alone crowd. But by being
"permission-based," Virtumundo can separate
itself from spammers and would pass muster even if the toughest anti-spam
federal legislation passed.

Ask Nguyen
how this new approach is different from what got him tagged as a spammer, and
he says, "I can't see the difference." Except for
the fact that when the complaints come in, "they're being directed to the
people doing the mailing."

Paul
Graham, the Bayesian guru and dot-com success story from Cambridge, says Virtumundo and companies like it have collected some of
their opt-in customers by buying up the mailing
lists of bankrupt dot-coms, which had, buried in
their terms of service, clauses stipulating the right to share subscribers' e-mail addresses. "If 60 percent of all Internet users in this
country have signed up for Virtumundo, it should be pretty
easy to find one of your friends who has done it. But
you know what? If you ask, you won't find any of your friends who did."

Travis W.
Tisa, executive vice president of Virtumundo, says
his company bought addresses from third parties in the past, but a "bad
experience" nearly two years ago prompted a new policy requiring that
users "opt in" directly with Virtumundo. He
says one of the company's most effective sources for new consumers has been its
website treeloot.com, an "online money tree" that promises visitors
the chance to win up to $25,000 in exchange for viewing advertisements.

Tisa says
that when Virtumundo gets complaints from customers
who insist they never "opted in," it happily removes their e-mail addresses from the the database.
"We've built the company on getting people's permission," he says.

Still, it's
a safe bet that there are people out there now getting permission-based pitches
for Nguyen's products and websites, seeing them as yet more spam, and cursing
as they wear out their wrists hitting the "delete" button. All of
this suggests that by the time spam in its current form has been beaten, it will likely have morphed into something else.

This
moving-target phenomenon is what makes the multiple-tour-of-duty warriors in the
spam fight so much more pessimistic - cynical even - than the fresh recruits
like Paul Graham.

Steve
Atkins is a 33-year-old computer consultant in Palo Alto, California, who first
enlisted in the spam wars eight years ago. He created a website called SamSpade.org,
which gives users tools to track down spammers. He used to think spam could be
stopped. Now he'll settle for containment.

How about
Graham's Bayesian solution? "I know Paul," says Atkins. "Poor bastard. He's way too optimistic." Atkins's
experience tells him that if these new filters become widely used, spammers
will simply find ways around them.

"People
who have not been working on the problem for a while don't follow through to
the future," Atkins says. "They just focus on the state of things
now." Even in the unlikely event that e-mail spam were stopped, the parasite would probably find a new
host, he says. In Japan, where text-messaging between cellphones
quickly became the dominant medium, spam has nearly overwhelmed it.

Most people
involved in the fight admit that if spam is to be vanquished, it will take
winning on three fronts simultaneously - technical, legal, and legislative. The
odds for victory on the technical front might be improved if leaders were
willing to take truly dramatic steps, such as changing the longstanding
protocols governing e-mail to remove its anonymity (making
it much harder for spammers to hide) or charging a fraction of a penny to send
each e-mail.

Even with
spam outrage riding high, however, few leaders appear
willing to mess with the essential components of e-mail's success -
its anonymity and lack of cost. So veteran warriors tend to
fall into one of two categories: those who burn out and wave the white flag and
those who find a way to salve their wounds while they fight on. Atkins
falls into the latter group. He and his wife, Laura, who is president of the
nonprofit SpamCon Foundation, now run a thriving,
full-time consultancy company, helping ISPs and advertisers who use e-mail to avoid spam and avoid being confused with spam. "For
us, absolutely, it's become profitable," he says.

If it's any
consolation to all those techies who have yet to forgive Laurence Canter for
what he spawned, he now says he'd like to become a spam-stopper, too. The
father of modern spam rode the wave in 1994 - he and his former wife even
published a book, How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway. But
the fortune and infamy soon fizzled. He got tired of being chased by angry
techies from one ISP to another. The business he and Martha Siegel started,
called Cybersell, went bust. Eventually, so did their
marriage. By 1996, he had moved to northern California to work as a software
engineer and lower his profile.

That's
where he remains today. On a recent Monday, he sits down at his computer in his
L-shaped home in Sonoma County, where he and his girlfriend keep three
miniature horses out back and a Mazda Miata in the
garage. He opens his in-box to find that he's been hit with 679 spam messages
in just two days. That's about average for him. That his daily barrage of spam
is worse than most is probably a function of the number of years he's had his e-mail addresses out on the Web, and the fact that he once bought
something - a cordless mouse - in response to a spam, making his address a
golden commodity among spammers. (Sadly, he also found out about his former
wife's death through spam. In December 2000, he says, he got a piece of spam
pushing an ancestors' website. Out of curiosity, he typed Siegel's name into
the database, and up popped her Social Security death rec
ord from three months earlier.)

Canter says
he wishes he could write a program that would effectively block all spam while
making sure all the good stuff still gets through. He has a friend in marketing
who'd like to see him do the same thing, mainly because she's already come up
with the winning name of the software they would sell: Father of Spam Kills
Child. But he's afraid his progeny adapts too quickly.

For a long
time, Canter tried hard to distance himself from spam and the lingering ire of
the tech world. Yet he didn't protest when his girlfriend recently threw him a
50th birthday party that had a spam theme. Nowadays, he looks at spam with the
same mix of anger and boys-will-be-boys admiration of a reformed hippie
learning that his teenage son just got pinched for pot possession. Last year,
in what he calls "a pure experiment," he inhaled once more.

Browsing
through Amazon.com, he stumbled across a book called If You Don't Feed the
Teachers, They Eat the Students. He knew nothing about it and had never heard
of its author (Neila A. Connors). But he immediately
fell in love with the book on the basis of its title alone. He signed up his
website as an Amazon.com "affiliate," meaning he would collect a
small percentage from every book sold to someone who was directed to Amazon by
his site. Pretty much anyone with a website can do that. But Amazon doesn't
condone what he did next: Canter spent about a day harvesting the e-mail addresses of as many K-12 teachers as he could find, mostly
by trolling public school websites, and then he blasted an ad for the book to
50,000 addresses.

Here's what
happened: Nearly 700 people ended up buying the book after receiving Canter's
spam - enough to let the obscure treatise with a catchy title crack Amazon's
Top 100 for a day. The maneuver provided Canter with about $700 in revenue, a
form letter from Amazon asking him not to do it again,
and yet another lesson about why this war will not be won anytime soon.
"In spite of all the open hostility toward spam," Canter says,
smiling, "if you're selling the right thing to the right person, the fact
that it's come through spam won't stop them."

Neil Swidey
can be reached at swidey “at” globe.com.

SIDEBAR:

A SELECTED SPAM
GLOSSARY

Spam: Unsolicited bulk e-mail, unsolicited commercial e-mail, or both. Name
comes from Monty Python, not Hormel.

Ham: “Good” email, i.e., everything that
isn’t spam.

False Positive: When a filter mistakes ham for
spam.

Bayesian: Type of filter (based on a mathematical theorem
called Bayes’s Rule) that determines the
likelihood that an e-mail message is spam by combining the spam probabilities
of multiple words, or “tokens,” within it.
“Unsubscribe” is a token with a high spam probability.

Rules-Based: Type of filter (generally less effective) in which
a computer is fed certain “rules,” such as, “Do not accept
any e-mails containing the word ‘Viagra.’”

Honey Pot: An e-mail account that is designed solely to
attract spam, so that filter-writers can figure out how to smoke out spammers.

Dictionary Attack: Method spammers use for collecting
e-mail addresses in which a program generates various combinations of letters
and numbers in an attempt to find active e-mail addresses.

Harvesting: Another method
spammers use to gather e-mail addresses, in which software
“scrapes” the web looking for e-mail addresses posted on web pages
and in internet chat rooms and newsgroups.

Open or Click-Through Rates: The percentage of recipients who actually open a spam message, click on the
link contained in it, or, in some cases, click through a certain number of
pages at the destination website. Spammers are often paid based on these rates.

Phishing: Method spammers and other bad
actors use to collect people’s personal information for identity theft
and credit card fraud by setting up websites designed to look like those run by
legitimate companies.

Trojan Horse: Form of malicious software,
designed to look innocent but which actually gets a computer to do bad deeds on
someone else’s behalf.