The Dirty Little Secret About Spam

The most fervent antispam activists now predict that the world's email system will seize up within six months. Some organizations just won't have the server capacity to handle the onslaught, and our inboxes will be so packed as to be useless. Even more circumspect forecasters agree that small ISPs and businesses may soon be overwhelmed.

All of this offends Sernovitz in a number of ways. He hates that 10-year-olds get messages that advertise porn sites, and he hates that his own inbox is clogged with crap that he never asked for. Mostly, though, spam offends his passion for direct marketing. "Spam ruins the game," he says. "Great direct marketing is all about talent. Two guys can send out a message, and if it's any good, people will buy from them. It's pure sport -- and now, the cheaters have taken over the competition."

Unlike you or me or almost anyone with a telephone and a mailbox, Sernovitz loves direct marketing. Really. When he was 14, he started supplying lists of classmates in Milwaukee to a direct-mail broker. Throughout high school, he worked for a company called A.B. Data, marketing political campaigns. The consulting firm that he has just sold, GasPedal, advises clients on effective email strategies.

That odd passion is why Sernovitz will persevere, why he's willing to take on the economics and politics of spam. No, not much money has rolled in since he unveiled the task force in April; Sernovitz says that for now he has stopped asking for checks. But he talks of plans to staff up and roll out in September.

That's when the Inbox Defense Task Force will start digging. There are ways to sniff out an email's trail. Sernovitz expects to use that information to expose the bad guys. He hopes to gather evidence of fraud -- misleading sender or subject lines, or unsubscribe links that purposely don't work -- that state attorneys general can use to prosecute spammers. He'll confront the ISPs that host spammers' traffic -- and if they don't desist, he'll humiliate them publicly. He'll report criminal activity to credit-card companies and press them to cut off spammers' merchant accounts.

"We'll teach law-enforcement agencies how to go after these guys," Sernovitz says. "We'll teach consumers how to find out who's harassing them and how to tell the difference between the bad guys and the good." And when the dust clears, spammers will go to jail. The ones who don't will give up the business, because it won't be worth the hassle. We'll all get less spam. Sernovitz is convinced of this.

In the Inbox of the Beholder

"Why do they call me a spammer?" asks Steve Hardigree, who is tanned and fit, affable and decorous. He is married, with two young children. With close-cropped blond hair and a soft Georgia twang, he comes across as a college-football coach.

Hardigree is the founder and president of Opt In Inc., a company of 30 employees in Boca Raton, Florida. Hardigree says that he sends an average of 20 million emails a day, all of them to people who have, in some fashion, asked to receive them. His 45 data partners -- some of which he also controls -- collectively maintain lists of 60 million email addresses. He says that Opt In, with revenue of $6.5 million last year, is profitable.

Sernovitz dearly wants to nail Hardigree. "Everyone knows him. He's the biggest spammer in the business," Sernowitz says. "I want to expose what he is and what he does."

For Sernovitz, Hardigree embodies the worst of email marketing: a spammer cloaked in false respectability. Opt In, says Sernovitz, lies about how it gets email addresses. It mass-mails without regard to recipients' actual interests. He claims it sends messages that aren't wanted. It doesn't respond when people ask to be removed from its databases.

Hardigree disputes the charges of Sernovitz and other antispammers. For one thing, Hardigree says, he doesn't hide behind fake addresses: The emails that he sends can be easily identified as those of Opt In. He also claims that he has never surreptitiously "harvested" addresses en masse from Web sites or hijacked accounts through which to relay messages. He emails only people who have given Opt In permission to do so -- and when people ask to be removed from his lists, he complies.

Hardigree's is a relatively loose version of opt-in email marketing: At Opt In's partner sites, an individual volunteers his email address and, often, other information about his demographics and interests. At many partner sites, the visitor is promised something in return: a shot at a big cash prize or vacation, or free software. At some sites, the connection between registration and future email pitches is explicit; at others, it is less so.