IRRITATED by the constant stream of junk mail thrust through your letterbox? Unsolicited e-mail can be just as annoying, and with the right tools it鈥檚 even easier for businesses to flood the Net with their sales pitches than it is to use paper post. These adverts may appear as unwanted e-mail, or as announcements in dozens of newsgroups (the practice known as spamming).
The Arizona law firm Canter & Seigel was first to spam in a big way in 1994, whipping up a storm of protest. Nowadays, this kind of use (or abuse) is becoming commonplace. Whichever newsgroups you read, you will almost certainly find messages like 鈥淎re you in debt? Need $MONEY$?鈥� cropping up occasionally. And within a few weeks of getting Net access, particularly through large American service providers such as America Online or CompuServe, you will probably get some junk e-mail.
Enraged users have fought back in a number of ways. A blacklist of Net advertisers has been set up at http://www-math.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/BL/ and elsewhere, and newsgroups have been set up to monitor and discuss the behaviour of the perpetrators. The names of these groups begin news.admin.net-abuse. America Online (AOL), the largest provider (http://www.aol.com), recently announced that it will block e-mail from the worst offenders. Online newspaper c|net, at http://www.news.com/, carries an article in which AOL reveals that junk e-mail has become its members鈥� number one concern and that one company, Cyberpromotions (http://www.cyberpromo.com/), sends one or two messages daily to 900 000 of AOL鈥檚 subscribers.
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If you want to hear the 鈥渂ulk e-mail鈥� lobby鈥檚 case, check out the Direct Email Marketing Association (DEMA) at http://kww.com/dema/. The association runs an e-mail list and keeps archives of discussions on its Web site. More general discussion of Net marketing-including often heated arguments of its pros and cons-can be found on the IMARCOM mailing list. To join it, send a message containing only 鈥淪UBSCRIBE IMARCOM鈥� to LISTSERV@INTERNET.COM.
If you do not want to receive any junk e-mail from DEMA members or others contact dema@kww.com. Write 鈥淣O DIRECT E-MAIL.鈥� in the subject line. If you are not sending the message from your usual e-mail address, put your address in the body of the message.
