Spambusters

<= img border=3D0 width=3D105 height=3D20 src=3D"bostonglobe_spambusters_files/ima= ge002.gif" align=3Dleft alt=3D"The Boston Globe" v:shapes=3D"_x0000_s1028">

= Author(s): Neil Swi= dey

= Date: October 5, 2003

= Page: 12

= Section: Magazine

Lau= rence Canter leans forward, scrunches up his sunburned nose, and says with a smil= e, ``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 gri= gio. 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.

Can= ter and his wife at the time, Martha Siegel, were immigration lawyers in Phoenix. W= hen the US Immigration and Naturalization Service announced it would hold a lot= tery 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 comp= uter engineers. Canter had always been a closet techie, and he figured the Net w= ould 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 ou= tlay 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. =

Fas= t-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 h= as unspeakably filthy toilets and depraved hucksters hovering over every park bench and near every kiddie pool, peddling ever= ything from herbal Viagra to bestiality peep-show passes. Parents are becoming afr= aid 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 Inte= rnet 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 da= y. 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 rapacio= usly 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, simp= ly 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 sp= am is the manifold brigade of warriors now assembled to fight it. The group includes programmers and profiteers, litigators and legislators, law-enforc= ing scolds and law-breaking vigilantes. They have almost nothing in common besi= des 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 l= ine 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 for= k. "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.

Mak= ing arrangements to meet him, I suggest a 10 a.m. interview. "Ten is a lit= tle early," he replies. When I arrive at 11 the next morning, Graham, dres= sed 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 include= s 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, la= tely, 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 instructi= ons such as "Don't accept any e<= /span>-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 nu= meral "1."

The= n 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 contai= ning 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.

Gra= ham quickly designed his Bayesian filter, set up a bunch of "honey pots&qu= ot; - 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" <= span style=3D'mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'>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 t= he e-mails they send him.)

Whe= n 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 do= es 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 n= ow 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. =

Mea= nwhile, 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 th= an 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.)

&qu= ot;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 G= raham is hearing footsteps. These guys - there aren't many women to be found in t= his 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 re= ally need, right?"

JUST WHAT IS SPAM, AND IS IT ILLEGAL? To s= ome 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 t= he the two. (The fdefinition= would include electronic begging from the red cross or= your state representative, the second would include an advance-showing alert fro= m 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.

Lat= ely, 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 wo= rk on the wild side often takes place while his wife, two teenage sons, and dog are sitting in the next room.

&qu= ot;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.

Ear= ly this year, True and two of his co-workers at a speech-recognition company launch= ed their own start-up, called Audiotrieve. If the company name fails to suggest any connection to anti-s= pam 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 lendi= ng library - where he found lots of code for Bayes= ian filtering that other t= ech 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, bu= t 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.

The= n 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.

Sin= ce July, they've sold about 1,000 copies of their new $24.95 product, which is calle= d 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,&quo= t; he says.

Tru= e 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 a= nti-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?

&qu= ot;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 Inte= rnet stand ards in light of the spam problem, Shein says, he occasionally gets suspicious that &quo= t;some of the people around the table who are being argumentative and disruptive m= ight 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 tha= t he rubs often, and long wisps of gray hair that extend from his eyebrows. He s= pins 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, befo= re AOL, before Prodigy, there was Barry Shein, hoo= king up customers to the Internet from his second-floor office in the Tudor clock-tower building in Coolidge Corner.

Rem= arkably, 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 com= bat with spammers - Shein alternately calls them &q= uot;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 somewhe= re 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 t= hey really did nothing to deserve this bad rap.

Mon= ty 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 distre= ss 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 techi= es, 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 Pat= ent and Trademark Office to prevent SpamArrest, a s= mall Seattle-based maker of anti-spam software, from tradem= arking 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 se= ems 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 repr= esented AOL in its effort to go after a j= unk 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 cli= ent. Praed is now part lawyer, part private detectiv= e, and part forensic scientist.

The= se days, few spammers do their spamming in plain view. The pressures from Internet service providers, Web-hosting services, and the general public are so stro= ng 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.

Sur= e, 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 fo= r a membership to the porn site, the maneuver will have paid off. (Porn sites o= ften pay affiliates more in commission than the sites collect from a new members= hip, 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 mo= re 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 reve= al 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 th= eir stuff."

Sti= ll, there are far too many spammers and far too much opportunity for obfuscatio= n 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 t= he 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 f= or the passage of one on the federal level.

Dav= id E. Sorkin, an associate professor of law at The John Marshall Law School in Chicago, h= as been tracking anti-spam legislation across the country since 1996. His exhaustive website, spamlaws.com, is a testament to bot= h 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 lar= gely unenforceable - anti-spam laws pass.

Aft= er years of seeing anti-spam laws die in Congress, Sorkin says, "This year it seems quite possible that one of them will pass.&q= uot; 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 becom= e 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 t= he 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 blackli= sts (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 bl= acklisters, some are careful in their research and responsive to complaints from the wrongly accused. Others create their lists capriciously, providing no mecha= nism for getting off and penalizing lots of legitimate businesses that simply ha= ve the misfortune of getting their Web-hosting from a service that also happen= s to host a spammer. (Spammers have begun fighting back, using other computers as "Trojan horses" to overload the blacklisters' systems.)

The= n 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 ma= il 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. Fi= nally, the junk e-mail started coming in by the thousands, shutting down his computer system. <= /span>

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 Sour= ce 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 addres= ses and began sending out messages to drive traffic to his sites.

The= n he ran into the anti-spam vigilantes. They put his sites on blacklists. They flood= ed his ISP with complaints until it dropped his service, and when they found o= ut which ISP he was going to use next, they did the same there. He got his law= yer to send cease-and-desist letters to as many of the vigilantes and black lis= t ers as he could find. The vigilantes countered by cre= ating a website about his lawyer, featuring her photograph and as much of her personal information as they could gather.

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

Sco= re one for the anti-spam crowd, right? Not exactly. Ngu= yen 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 stunn= ing 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 se= parate 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, a= nd 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.&= quot;

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 t= his country have signed up for Virtumundo, it shoul= d 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."= ;

Tra= vis W. Tisa, executive vice president of Virtumundo, s= ays 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 visito= rs the chance to win up to $25,000 in exchange for viewing advertisements.

Tis= a says that when Virtumundo gets complaints from custo= mers who insist they never "opted in," it happily removes their e-mail addresses from the the databa= se. "We've built the company on getting people's permission," he says= .

Sti= ll, it's a safe bet that there are people out there now getting permission-based pit= ches for Nguyen's products and websites, seeing them as yet more spam, and cursi= ng 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 els= e.

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

Ste= ve Atkins is a 33-year-old computer consultant in Palo Alto, California, who f= irst enlisted in the spam wars eight years ago. He created a website called SamS= pade.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." Atk= ins's experience tells him that if these new filters become widely used, spammers will simply find ways around them.

&qu= ot;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.

Mos= t 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 (ma= king it much harder for spammers to hide) or charging a fraction of a penny to s= end each e-mail.

Eve= n with spam outrage riding high, however, few leaders a= ppear willing to mess with the essential components of e-mail's succ= ess - its anonymity and lack of cost. So veteran warriors ten= d 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. Atki= ns falls into the latter group. He and his wife, Laura, who is president of the nonprofit SpamCon Foundation, now run a thrivin= g, full-time consultancy company, helping ISPs and advertisers who use e-mail to avoid spam and avoid being confused with spam. "F= or 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.

Tha= t'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 messag= es in just two days. That's about average for him. That his daily barrage of s= pam is worse than most is probably a function of the number of years he's had h= is 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.)

Can= ter says he wishes he could write a program that would effectively block all spam wh= ile making sure all the good stuff still gets through. He has a friend in marke= ting 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 hi= m 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 yea= r, in what he calls "a pure experiment," he inhaled once more. =

Bro= wsing 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 hea= rd of its author (Neila A. Connors). But he immedi= ately 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, most= ly by trolling public school websites, and then he blasted an ad for the book = to 50,000 addresses.

Her= e'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,<= /span> 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 f= act that it's come through spam won't stop them."

Neil Swid= ey can be reached at swidey “at” globe= .com.

SIDEBAR:

A SELECTED SPAM GLOSSARY

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

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

False Positive: When a filter mistakes ham f= or 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 probabiliti= es 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 wh= ich 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 spamme= rs.

Dictionary Attack: Method spammers use for coll= ecting e-mail addresses in which a program generates various combinations of lette= rs 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 pa= ges 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 ra= tes.

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 ru= n by legitimate companies.

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