Editor’s Corner:
Spammers Do Not Go Gently Into That Dark Cybernight

If you’ve been following the CyberPromotions case you know that they have been sued and lost, by major Internet providers and most recently had their web site closed down on them.

Cyber Promotions President Sanford Wallace was quoted as saying, "The anti-spammers have not won this war - they have just made it more difficult for themselves as we will now send mail from different sources. We have been disconnected but we have other means to continue mailings. It is going to be hard to keep us from sending mail. We are looking into getting our Web site up, but this does not mean we are out of business."

Even after losing legal battles with AOL, CompuServe, Earthlink, BigFoot and others, Wallace insists, "We want the same free speech rights as any commercial advertiser."

However, in U. S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Cyber Promotions, Inc. Vs. Apex Global Information Services, Inc. NO. 97-5931, the court said, "Recent cases have held that there is no First Amendment right to send bulk e-mail and that Internet service providers are permitted to block such mail if they choose."

So why would Wallace be so belligerent in his insistence to pursue his unconstitutional course?

Because e-mail is an irresistible opportunity for a guerrilla marketer.

Send one message or a million, the cost is the same. No need to merge-purge your lists — just send to everyone. The time and money spent on cleaning up lists could be better spent scavenging the Net for more names, also acquired free of cost.

Never in human history before has one human been able to sit in front of one computer and with only one phone line set up a mass mailing to millions. It’s such an incredible feat of technology that its awesomeness is also its terror. For the flip side of e-mail is that the recipient may be as heavily endowed technologically as the sender. Respondents can send mail bombs or flood mail servers with an ongoing stream of messages and cause that system to crash. This is the age of interactivity, after all.

Spamming will continue, I think, no matter what legal limitations might be put on UBC (unsolicited bulk e-mail). The task of communicating with spammers on a one-by-one basis requires too much due diligence for the average individual. There are filtering programs and our Internet service providers are best positioned to block these types of mailings. Yet there may be that one lingering doubt — might we be missing offers or ideas we should know about?