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Reviled by Internet users, scorned by Internet service providers, and hounded by antispam activists -- spammers are apparently seeking comfort in numbers.
Since the beginning of the year, over 150 junk e-mailers have joined The Bulk Club, an online service that offers tips, tools and a community for spammers, according to a membership list accidentally left exposed at the club's website.
A security flaw at the Bulk Club's website enabled unauthorized visitors to view the roster, which included some of the biggest names in bulk e-mailing, as well as numerous small-time operators. The glitch also enabled unauthorized users to post material in the site's news section earlier this week.
Among the Bulk Club's list of 159 "active members" was Damon Decrescenzo, one of the operators of Rockin Time Holdings, a Florida junk e-mailer sued by Microsoft in June and by Amazon this month. Also on the club's member rolls was Internet porn king Seth Warshavsky.
A sign-up page at the site states that, for a $20 monthly fee, Bulk Club subscribers get access to a variety of how-to articles, spamming software, a members' message board area, and "300,000 FRESH e-mails/week."
The apparent popularity of the Bulk Club, which launched about six months ago, challenges the conventional wisdom that junk e-mailers are lone-wolf operators who lurk in the Internet's shadows, or that the profession is dying off due to recent bad publicity.
Instead, the club's quickly swelling membership suggests that spammers intend to circle their wagons to protect the embattled bulk e-mail industry.
What's more, many of the club's members were newly attracted to the bulk e-mailing business, according to Drew Auman, operator of the club. In an e-mail interview, Auman said that the club was dedicated to promoting "responsible" business practices and that it offers information about misleading tactics used by some spammers simply to show why they are improper.
"We want to attempt to steer some marketers in a better direction than (where) they were heading but (as) with any business, some people just don't care to follow the rules," said Auman.
Bulk Club subscribers have access to such files as a document about antispam associations, an article titled "How to Spoof," and summaries of state spam regulations. Harvesting e-mail addresses from Web pages and discussion groups, also known as "extraction," is the topic of 17 articles.
While it may be the first to have its member roster made public, the Bulk Club is not the only organization catering to junk e-mailers. In the late '90s, a secretive outfit called the Bulk Barn claimed to be "The Web's Largest Private Club for Bulk Emailers." Now defunct, the Bulk Barn has been replaced by similar organizations, many of which primarily sell lists of e-mail addresses and software tools to spammers.
To stay off the radar of antispam activists, bulk club operators typically avoid using spam to publicize their sites and rely instead on word-of-mouth referrals and search engines to build membership. One such outfit, spamtraffic.com, claims antispam vigilantes harassed it out of business once they caught wind of its existence.
Auman said the Bulk Club narrowly escaped a similar fate this week.
After being notified Monday by Wired News about the club's server glitch, Internet security expert Thor Larholm posted a copy of the club's member roster to a discussion list that reports e-mail abuse. Larholm, co-founder of SPAMfighter, a Danish e-mail software firm, also planted a Web bug -- a special code for identifying the Internet addresses of viewers of a document -- in a phony news posting at the site.
According to Larholm, the information gleaned will enable antispam activists to "reveal the identities and actions of yet more spammers."
On Tuesday, the Bulk Club's homepage disappeared and was replaced with an "under construction" message. The site returned Wednesday but was not fully functional. Auman said he suspected the site was attacked by hackers, but declined to provide details.
"The impact to our business is extreme. Members who enjoy conversing with fellow members are unable to get access and potential members cannot learn about us," he said of the interruption in service.
According to the Bulk Club's member roster, other subscribers include John Milton, an alias used by Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a former neo-Nazi who became a penis-pill spammer.
The list also included several names found in ROKSO, a Spamhaus register of known spam operators. One of these, Bulk Club member Jon Thau, markets penis enlargement pills through a firm called Cyberworks, according to the ROKSO registry.
Steve Lazuka, head of search-engine marketing firm Traffic Logic, said his name appeared on the Bulk Club membership list because one of his employees signed up "because they thought it was an informational resource about the current industry laws." Lazuka said he has no association with the club.
