The Spammer Next Door

For Karl Barth, starting a job as the electronic postmaster at Drexel University in Philadelphia was like flipping the light switch in a room infested with cockroaches.

Barth became postmaster in July 2002. Since the previous March, the volume of junk e-mail clogging Drexel's servers had quadrupled. Barth, who had worked on big e-mail systems up and down the East Coast, made reducing spam his first priority. "Oh, my gosh, we're going to be overrun if we don't start fighting back," he remembers thinking.

The first e-mailer Barth blocked was Virtumundo, a Kansas City company founded in 1998 by a teenager.

"If I added it all up, they must have had a thousand of our addresses, maybe more," Barth says of Virtumundo. "They were just blasting stuff in. Always overnight, always at 2 or 3 in the morning. I'd come in in the morning, and I'd have all these complaints from people who'd say, 'Hey, I got this spam overnight. Can you do something about it?'"

Barth could. He built a digital moat that sunk messages with a Virtumundo return address, such as UBurnYourOwnDVDs@vmadmin.com. Before Barth dug the trench, he says, Virtumundo deluged each of its Drexel addresses with as many as five messages a day.

Barth is confident that he was right to block Virtumundo. No one complained to him when mail from the company's clients stopped arriving. "It wasn't like it was coming from Coca-Cola or Kraft Foods," Barth says. "It would be Joe's Off-Shore Casino and Sallie's Mortgage House in Montana."

Virtumundo once touted Miss Cleo, the supposedly Jamaican tarot-card reader. In 2001, Virtumundo's computers sent an e-mail that encouraged the mouse-clicking public to dial a phone number and hear about an exciting dream that Miss Cleo had shared with her "psychic associates." (Miss Cleo's own future dimmed considerably after the Federal Trade Commission accused her employer of misleading consumers. The Psychic Readers Network eventually paid a $5 million fine and forgave $500 million in customer charges.)

Advertising the likes of Miss Cleo can earn a company a bad reputation. Paul Graham, a programmer who uses statistical analysis to filter spam, has written on the Web that the word Virtumundo is as reliable an indicator of spam as the word teens.

Yet Virtumundo does not count among the industry's bottom feeders, the sort who spell Viagra with a filter-beating @ and come up with countless ways to deliver amazing news about the benefits of penis enlargement. The Spamhaus Project, a British-based organization locked in battle with unsolicited commercial e-mail, omits Virtumundo from its list of known spam operations. Virtumundo was also absent from the gaggle of spammers sued recently by AOL, Microsoft and other major Internet service providers (ISPs).

Virtumundo's CEO, Michael Shopmaker, resents the spammer tag. "We want those guys to go away," Shopmaker says. The company prefers to be known as a "permission-based marketing company." Shopmaker says Virtumundo's users, a prized database of 70 million e-mail addresses, have agreed to receive offers for, say, satellite-TV services and child-support collection.

Spam? Virtumundo hates the stuff. All the clutter, all the complaints hinder its ability to deliver what it believes are targeted messages to a willing audience. "If the consumer gets a hundred pieces of mail a day, they're much less likely to respond to anything," Virtumundo founder Scott Lynn, who is now 24 years old, says.

Lynn says Virtumundo sends offers to less than 10 percent of the names in its database in a given month. Systems administrators, meanwhile, say they've noticed less traffic emanating from the company's servers. Still, spam watchers regard Virtumundo with suspicion.

"I know lots of people who get spam from them," says John R. Levine, coauthor of Fighting Spam for Dummies. "I know lots of people who have them permanently blocked. They've told people they're going to clean up their act, but they have a lot of cleaning to do."

Spam sucks.

It lies ("Re: last night"). It cheats ("X¨nax for less"). It steals ("Well dear friend we need your assistance in transferring some of the money derived from gold").

The volume and vulgarity ("Go in for some muff-diving!") of spam mar a genuine innovation; checking e-mail now counts as a chore. And the ease with which junk e-mail can be distributed -- some spammers work out of mobile homes -- makes it far more pervasive than other modern annoyances, such as telemarketing and regular junk mail.

Spam haters equate unsolicited commercial e-mail to pollution. The logo adopted by Clueless Mailers, an anti-spam Web site, borrows heavily from hazardous-waste warnings. The site's rhetoric is no less apocalyptic. "Spammers are basically destroying e-mail as a means for the good of society," Bill Yerazunis, a Mitsubishi Research Labs scientist who also writes spam filters, tells the Pitch.

The big ISPs are beginning to echo Internet do-gooders like Yerazunis. A lawyer for AOL warned last year of a "spam crisis." Bill Gates wrote last summer in The Wall Street Journal that MSN and Hotmail servers block 2.4 billion messages a day.

ISPs try to distinguish between commercial e-mailers who follow the rules and those who don't. One way spam shops are judged is by their method of gathering e-mail addresses. The shadier operations poach e-mail addresses by sending drones into chat rooms and by using the "dictionary method," which assumes, for instance, that approximately 10,000 Yahoo users can be reached by typing "Sarah" and any combination of four digits before the ampersand.