Michael Herrick thought he had hit on an ingenious way to fight spam.
The president of Matterform Media, in the Santa Fe, N.M., suburb of Espanola, had devised a software program to disable the so-called Web beacons that spammers insert into their messages to alert them when one of their e-mails is actually opened. Giving junk e-mailers a taste of their own medicine, the program dispatched streams of data back to the senders, inscribed with personal messages.
"It can be a little satisfying saying, 'Thanks for the spam, you dirtball,' especially if you can say that a couple hundred times a day," Herrick recently recalled.
The spammers weren't amused. They responded one morning last year by sending mass e-mails containing graphic sexual photographs and a link to Matterform's website. Herrick said recipients turned the messages over to SpamCop, a Seattle anti-spam company that then added Matterform to its blacklist, which identified Internet addresses from which spam originated. Matterform's website and e-mail system were crippled for 12 hours. And when Herrick finally got the situation straightened out, in came hundreds of furious e-mails accusing him of peddling porn.
"It was a pretty effective bit of revenge on us," he said.
That was one skirmish in the spam war. For anti-spam forces, it's always been like the whack-a-mole arcade game, in which beating down a plastic rodent just means another pops up. But these days, the moles are whacking back. And anti-spam entrepreneurs who a few years ago predicted they would eradicate what they view as an Internet affliction have had to acknowledge that they underestimated the tenacity of their opponents.
"We expected the battle to be over very quickly," said Dave Rand, co-founder of Mail Abuse Prevention System in San Jose, which began distributing free spam-blocking services in 1996, then selling them in 2001. "We were just wrong in so many different ways. The reality is it has been a continual escalation."
A federal law that took effect Jan. 1 outlaws many of the tricks that spammers use to deliver their pitches, and authorities last month made their first arrests under the Can Spam Act. But hunting down spammers is expensive and time-consuming. In any event, many marketers have moved their operations outside the United States to escape prosecution.
