here's a lot of anger about bulk e-mail on the Internet but not a lot of facts. How much spam travels over the Internet? Who sends the spam, and why? Are the people sending spam making money? Is e-mail marketing a legitimate business activity? And why can't people who are annoyed by spam simply click ''delete?''
It's hard to get answers to these questions because spammers, ironically, aren't a terribly communicative bunch. Although they excel in sending out e-mail, it's quite difficult to return their calls. Most spam messages are sent from throw-away Internet service provider accounts, since most ISPs forbid the practice. And while many spam messages have telephone numbers to call, they are frequently for fax machines or voice-mail systems.
I receive roughly 5 to 15 spam messages a day. I started calling the spammers back, trying to find out what's behind the messages. Recently I spoke with Dan O'Neil at Telefriend, an Internet marketing company in Spokane, Wash. Telefriend is looking for people to distribute a ''nutrient line'' and a ''cancer-ingredient free personal-use type line.'' Telefriend sent out 150,000 e-mail messages in seven weeks and found 31 people willing to be distributors. This sort of economics would drive a traditional marketing company out of business, but it's actually a good rate of return for e-mail marketing, O'Neil says.
The economics of the Internet allow the sending out of millions of e-mail messages for less than $30. And while a number of technical measures have been proposed for blocking spam, there are ways to get around them all.
A few years ago, most spamming on the Internet was the work of a few individuals who hired out their services to the public at-large. But in the coming months we're likely to see more individuals and small businesses getting into the act, as spam-it-yourself software becomes increasingly available.
For example, I recently received a piece of spam mail from Newport Internet Marketing, a three-person company based in northern California. For $129, the company will let you download bulk-mail software from its Web site. The program can automatically extract e-mail addresses from Internet newsgroups. Alternately, paying customers can download over 35 million e-mail addresses from the Web site.
''Once you order, you are set up in 15 minutes,'' says Robert Alan, one of the company's owners. Business, he says, is booming.
Two researchers that have looked at spam in depth are Lorrie Faith Cranor at AT&T Labs-Research and Brian A. LaMacchia at Microsoft. Over the past year they have analyzed the logs of more than 1.7 million e-mail messages received by AT&T and Lucent, and closely examined 400 messages which had been sent to AT&T system administrators by users who had complained about ''spam.''
The results of the study are enlightening. According to the paper, which will be published later this year in Communications of the ACM, the amount of spam mail received by AT&T and Lucent rose from 5 percent of all Internet mail received in April 1997 to 15 percent in September 1997.
Of the individual messages, 35 percent of the spam mail advertised ''money making opportunities'' and other get-rich-quick schemes. Roughly 11 percent advertised adult entertainment. Spammer's were advertising their own services or spamming software in 10 percent of the cases. The remaining 41 percent advertised a range of services and products. And roughly 3 percent was probably not spam at all - it was either not commercial or was probably solicited by the recipient.
Sometimes the researchers couldn't decide if a message was spam or not. For example, says Cranor, one of the alleged ''spam'' messages advertised a Baptist youth conference. ''I would say that if it was mailed to everybody on the Internet, it would be spam. But we don't know if it was mailed to everybody on the Internet. We know that one user reported receiving this. We don't know whether or not that user is a Baptist, if they ever expressed interest in Baptist youth conferences.''
I recently ran into this problem myself, when I sent out a batch of messages to 4,000 readers who had sent e-mail about my columns over the past three years. I wanted to inform them that they could now get my columns by e-mail. Hundreds of people signed up. But several people (less than 10) objected to my e-mail, calling it spam. Was its spam? I didn't think so. Cranor says it's impossible to know, because there is no hard-and-fast definition. For many people, spam is simply e-mail.
The US Senate recently passed a bill that would outlaw some forms of bulk e-mail on the Internet. A version of the Senate bill, along with four others, now await action in the House. Anti-spam activists have lambasted many of these bills, saying that they would legitimize the practice by allowing marketers to send e-mail to anybody, as long as the recipients had a way to remove themselves from marketers's mailing list.
I see a deeper problem with legislation: There is no way for it to apply to overseas businesses, which are responsible for roughly 10 percent of the spam messages I receive.
Back at Newport Internet Marketing, Robert Alan has a theory as to why people dislike receiving spam: ''My opinion is that everyone doesn't like it because they realize we are doing it for free. If they thought we had to pay to send it out, they wouldn't care.''
But what I think scares people most about spam is not the amount of junk e-mail being sent today, but the potential in the future. I like to eat in restaurants when I travel to San Francisco, but I don't want every restaurant in the Bay Area to e-mail me the next time I plan a trip there - even if each message contains a 15-percent-off coupon and even if I could remove myself from the mailing list by replying with the word ''unsubscribe.'' It would just be too much.
Nevertheless, it seems that this is the future we are heading toward.
For more information on spam, see http://simson.net/spam.html
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