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Need a gray shoebox? Call Tim Shetler, marketing vice president of TimesTen, a software maker based in Mountain View, Calif. He has had stacks of them in his office ever since Sept. 11, when he decided that sending out surprise packages was no longer a great gimmick to advertise TimesTen's database software. He was right. Within weeks the anthrax letters made even plain white envelopes look sinister.

No one expects the $582 billion direct-mail industry to disappear in the crisis. But a survey by the Direct Marketing Association following the reports of anthrax letters showed a third of all consumers were treating their mail with new suspicion. Many companies that relied on mail to reach customers are finding alternatives, from telemarketing to sophisticated new Internet techniques.

"Suddenly there's a huge surge in demand for e-mail lists," says Purdue University marketing professor Jon Anton. His surveys found that the cost of these lists, which had been sinking early last year, shot up 20% during the month following the start of the anthrax scare. Telemarketers, he says, are seeing a similar spike in business.

Bill Fraine, a vice president of the B2B software maker Commerce One, has abandoned snail mail for now. "After Sept. 11, we thought about how to get in touch with people," he says. "Normally we would have used direct mail. But I don't think people are opening their mail." So Fraine decided instead to rely on telemarketing and the Internet. Now sales reps from Commerce One call prospective customers and invite them to log onto a website at a given date and time and join a conference call. After they watch a slide presentation or video clips, they can ask questions, much as they would in a seminar at a trade show. So far the campaign seems to be more effective than direct mail.

The anthrax worries gave Caroline Ernst, director of e-commerce at FootSmart, a health-care products firm based in Norcross, Ga., the idea to tell customers by e-mail that the company's catalog was in the mail. Result: a 20% increase in sales. More e-mail ads now contain songs or video clips, such as the messages, with a 30-sec. trailer, promoting the Kevin Costner film Thirteen Days. If you have a microphone and speakers on your computer, clicking on links in some e-mail messages will connect you to a call center where sales reps can answer your questions live.

By clicking on links embedded in messages from the Gymboree children's-clothing company, customers can go directly to the part of the firm's website that sells what they want. By recording who clicks on what, Gymboree finds out which of its customers have toddlers or infants and those most interested in discounts or new product lines. It uses that data to refine future pitches. "We try to send messages only when we have something they want to hear," says vice president Susan Neal.

Therein lies the future of e-mail. Spam messages aimed at attracting customers are ineffective; people are even less likely to respond to e-mail from unfamiliar sources than they are to answer paper junk mail. Jupiter Media Metrix, based in New York City, estimates that marketers pay $125 to attract each new customer using e-mail and only $66 using direct mail. But customers are more receptive to firms they already do business with. Inducing an existing customer to make a new purchase costs $6 using e-mail, vs. $18 for direct mail. Says Jared Blank, a digital-commerce analyst at Jupiter: "They're good for different things."

Before the anthrax scare, Jupiter predicted that companies would increase their spending on e-mail marketing by 80% in 2001, but that only 3.5% of the new spending would come from direct-mail campaigns. He doesn't expect the anthrax scare to make a permanent dent in those numbers. And even if more poisonous letters emerge in the months ahead, they're not likely to wipe out direct mail. Says Blank: "People are just very attached to paper."