Jeff Slaton has built himself a business out of spamming the Net. And if anyone on the Net doesn't like it, his friends Smith & Wesson are very prepared to talk.
Patrick Townson, editor and publisher of the Internet Telecom Digest, asserts that Slaton has another way of getting addresses: by raiding them. "He broke in here and sent a lot of nasty messages to my mailing list and my newsgroup," Townson says. According to Townson, Slaton was able to obtain a complete subscriber list using a relatively obscure feature in sendmail, a Unix mail utility primarily used by sysadmins, and then sent his ads directly to readers, bypassing the moderator.
Slaton denies breaking into the Telecom mailing list: "Totally untrue! I am not a cracker," he says. "I have no use for Townson's subscriber list as I have many times more e-mail addresses on my database. Why would I waste my time?"
Is anything about spamming actually illegal? "US Code 47 says it's illegal to send commercial solicitations to a facsimile machine," says Robert Raisch, an 18-year veteran of the Internet and founder of The Internet Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "A fax machine is defined as any machine that connects to a telephone line and can render on paper."
Perhaps that covers a computer and an electronic mail system, but Raisch isn't sure. That's why he is working with a small group of people developing model legislation for US Representative Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts), the ranking minority member on the House Telecommunications Subcommittee. That legislation would make it illegal to send out unsolicited commercial e-mail.
"It's postage-due marketing," complains Raisch, referring to the hourly-rate costs of downloading unwanted material. "It's really kind of disappointing to see that the only way people like Slaton can find to make money on the Net is fundamentally stealing from others."
Others counter that increased legislation of the Net is precisely the wrong way to protect it.
"It is premature to suggest that we need laws on this," says Robert Smith, publisher of the Privacy Journal, a Rhode Island-based newsletter that has been following the impact of computers on privacy for more than 25 years. "One good thing about the Net is that it's free of bureaucracy and regulation. It's self-governing unlike any other institution I know of. Users of the Net will figure out a methodology to combat this."
And he may be right. The Net is a wily, inventive opponent, and even if the network is regulated, it would be difficult to stop spammers based in the Netherlands or Tokyo. Besides, if spammers like Slaton, and people who hire them, get enough of the Net's special brand of harassment, perhaps no reputable business will risk it.
Or perhaps that's wishful thinking.
Offering up a gold mine of 6 million potential consumers, Jeff Slaton isn't just selling spams - he's selling dreams.
