Putting Junk E-Mail in Its Place

So you don’t like receiving “junk mail” in your e-mail any more than you like seeing it delivered to your home.

Just as I can hardly find the real mail among the catalogs, political fliers, real estate solicitations and sweepstakes offers (none of which we ever win) that arrive at my house, I start my day tossing out much of the e-mail filling my computer basket.

The debate over what to do about junk e-mail is among the most overheated issues of our painful transition to mainstream electronic commerce. Letters and articles decrying the practice of sending unwanted commercial messages are filled with exclamation points, bold statements and type, apparently to let anyone passing by know that this is a Cause.

The issue attracted attention again as the result of a court decision in November allowing America Online to bar “bulk mailer” Cyber Promotions Inc. of Philadelphia, a commercial distributor of promotional material, from deluging AOL subscribers with junk mail.

Subscribers, of course, had complained to AOL, demanding action. At one point, AOL said it returned 500,000 undeliverable mailings at once to Cyber Promotion’s Internet carrier, crashing that system. Cyber Promotions moved to another carrier and the process repeated, leaving Internet access companies thinking twice about whether they will allow promotional mailing organizations on their services.

Cyber Promotions maintains its own Web site at https://www.cyberpromo.com with forms and invitations for businesses to hire them to send out promotional material to whichever groups seem likely buyers. The lure is that the pricing is said to be a fraction of postal rates.

The Cyber Promotions company is not the only one of its kind. Earlier, Carter & Siegal Inc. won attention for launching targeted e-mail services, as well as considerable notoriety as pioneers of what so many view with distaste. And there are now eight or 10 more big promotions mailing houses.

Although the splashiest fights to date have involved online services such as AOL that offer memberships and thus have a business interest in limiting mailings, we’re seeing the development of a populist opposition.

Sites such as https://www.junkbuster.com and https://www.ca-probate seem to be magnets for activists on the issue. These sites list articles, personal arguments, papers and sponsor discussions on the junk mail issue. And they have listings of other places to go to broaden the inquiry to ethical issues on the Internet.

Some other vigilante areas: the discussion group news.net-abuse.misc, the sites https://www.paranoia.com/~ricardo/faq.html and https://kryten.eng.monash.edu.au/gspam.html. John Rivard’s Stop Junk E-Mail page (https://www.mcs.com/~jcr/junkemail.html) is an excellent source for related sites.

The Junkbusters site says right off: “Are you sick of Junk? How would you like a way to tell telemarketers not to call you, even before they call? Or a way to get some control over what arrives in your mailbox? Or a way to notify junk e-mailers that they may have to pay you?”

Junkbusters of Cambridge, Mass., offers specific techniques in how to rebel, a sort of guide to guerrilla warfare against businesses wanting to promote their wares. They include sample letters of protest, escalation and, while warning that “we are not lawyers,” even move the needle up to court action.

One anti-junker baldly calls the president of a bulk mailer a “terrorist” who is “harassing” him and won’t allow him to discontinue receiving the unwanted messages. Another calls his personal Web offering “Tom Raynor’s ‘I Hate Junk E-mail’ page.”

Letters come in to the computer magazines all the time on this issue. Mark Eckenwiler told fellow readers of Internet World that a postal law gives hope, and he guided readers to https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/39/3008.html

Other sites, including EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (https://www.epic.org), see e-mail as a small subset of the larger problems of junk mailing campaigns. Robert Bulmash of Private Citizens Inc. (https://webmill.com/pvtctzn) outlines the legal protections available and offers $10 and $20 subscriptions to efforts to halt telemarketing calls and junk mail. Bulmash sees e-mail as a smaller problem and one that should be protected by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which bars unsolicited pitches over telephone lines to devices such as fax machines.

Bulmash works with Russ Smith (https://www.russ-smith.com) to support claims against direct-mail companies. A growing number of claims are resulting in settlements or legal judgments for consumers, although these have been the result of individual action rather than some campaign.

I saw a recent notice of a relatively new service called Rover (https://www.roverbot.com), which advertises itself as an automated e-mail mailing list researcher. It is a site advocating a service to crawl through sites on the Web to gather e-mail and Web page addresses and capture them into a database.

It did occur to me that this is just the sort of thing that fires the ire of anti-junkers. So I called Brian Clark, president of Global Media Design, who explained that his approach is to provide a service for Internet professionals, such as Web designers and hosting companies, who seek out addresses of Web pages that move or change name. Yes, there is a database of names, but it is for clients only and not released for use by promoters.

He said, “E-mail is too easy to see as a target and too easy for some companies to abuse.” So Rover makes a point of offering information about fighting the electronic junk mail houses and sponsors discussions about unwanted e-mail.

Ah, I thought, what we’re seeing is the marriage of ethics and e-mail. This is an expression of that funny word “Netiquette,” the etiquette of the Internet, and an image of citizens rising to demand good behavior among neighbors.

Cheryl Gilbert, a contributor to the Rover discussion group, summed up the passion: “As a savvy Internet user, if I want to receive information about something, I go looking for it. I do not wish to receive e-mail attempting to sell me something no matter how ‘personalized’ it is. In fact, there are ways in which the personalization bothers me more than the scattershot approach of the more fly-by-night spammers.

“To me, since I pay for the download of my e-mail, to receive unsolicited mail with intent to sell is theft. Theft of my time and theft of my resources. . . .”

Terry Schwadron is deputy managing editor of The Times and oversees latimes.com, its Web site. He can be reached via e-mail at terry.schwadron@latimes.com