Spam Shootout Starts

WASHINGTON -- A showdown featuring e-marketers and anti-spammers lent a Wild West air here to a Federal Trade Commission conference on spam, the growing pest consumers love to hate.

The FTC says it aims to corral spam, those unwanted e-mails from the sketchy outposts of the Internet frontier. But apparently spam is in the eye of the beholder.

Spam profiteers and prey disagree on how to define the unsolicited electronic messages. Some advertisers see beauty in e-mail marketing, but most conference-goers adamantly agree the practice is a "scourge" or "toxic sea." Attendees include representatives of marketing companies, the federal government, ISPs, and consumer groups.

Just a Living

"We don't deceptively lure people to our Web sites," said William Waggoner, founder of Las Vegas e-marketing firm AAW Marketing.

Waggoner, who says he has received death threats from unhappy e-mail recipients and anti-spammers, blames the spam epidemic on unethical operators.

He says AAW Marketing helps thousands of companies send 15 million e-mail messages daily. These pitches, which commonly feature penis enhancement and sexual arousal remedies, are neither pornographic nor spam, he said.

Waggoner said his eight-person shop sends e-mails only to people who responded to solicitations on Web forms. He said he never lures customers with phony subject lines.

"What you see in the subject line is what you get in the e-mail itself," he said.

Bills or Bogus?

Spam bills now pending before Congress range from a national opt-out list to placing bounties on deceptive spammers.

Obscene e-mails greeting the teenage daughter of Senator Charles Schumer (D-New York) motivated the senator to fight spam by introducing new legislation. But Waggoner says the real dirty spammers are teenagers themselves.

"It's 14-year-old kids," Waggoner said of spam purveyors. "It makes me very angry to be attacked personally, but I'm a guy you can find. There's a lot of idiots in this business."

One former spammer now works as a consultant to Waggoner's business. John Penn, owner of Upper Echelon Enterprises, said he quit spamming in Ohio when the state banned it.

Penn said a national spam law might even boost his business but there should be legal consequences for people who "cry spam" and ruin the reputation of legitimate companies. If they sign up for Internet sweepstakes, he said, then they have no right to complain when they receive e-mail solicitations.

Penn said the notion that unsubscribing leads to more spam is "urban legend." Recipients of unwanted e-mail solicitations can drop off the list, he says.

But Waggoner, asked how to unsubscribe from his e-marketing lists, did not directly answer. And while he denied his company harvests random e-mail addresses from the Internet, he suggested Web surfers become more street-smart. "If you post your e-mail addresses on the Internet, you're going to open yourself up to being e-mailed," Waggoner said.

Battle on Several Fronts

It's unrealistic to expect the average Web surfer to be so savvy, said Gilson Terriberry, owner of Direct Contact Marketing Group. His one-person firm finds e-mail lists for businesses ranging from trade associations to wine newsletters.

Customer response rates to his clients' e-mail ads have drastically dropped in the last two years because "spam has poisoned the well," he said.

Established marketers who moved their direct mail operations online in the past decade generally define spam as unwanted e-mail sent from anonymous sources. But some people consider any unknown e-mail, including those they signed up for, as spam.

Each day the FTC receives 130,000 spam messages, which it stores in a "refrigerator." Start-up business offers, pornography, and financial services comprise 55 percent of spam received by the FTC, representatives said.

The Justice Department estimates most spam is sent by a mere 200 sources. It took Washington State Attorney General Christine Gregoire 14 subpoenas to unravel the identity of a single spammer, she said.

Principled e-marketers could benefit from regulations, because they would differentiate the legit businesses "from the unwashed masses" of spammers, said Brian Arbogast, a Microsoft vice president of mobile services.

"Strong criminal penalties for the really slimy folks" are a good idea, agreed Joe Barrett, a senior vice president of systems operations at America Online.

But Waggoner said giants like AOL and Microsoft are just as guilty of perpetuating spam, and he called AOL's campaign to block two billion spam messages a day "a complete fraud."