Some More Spam, Please

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A well-timed reminder to shake the toner can be helpful. But there's a fine line between helping and nagging, and we appear to be growing less tolerant of the onslaught. The effects of e-mail-marketing overload can be seen in declining response rates. About 7% of e-mail recipients today click through to a website in response to an offer; just a year ago, 10% might have done so. They also take longer to respond, from three days a few years ago to a week or so now. "It's not a novelty anymore," says Jupiter analyst Jared Blank.

Blame the skunky old brand of spam (which got its name from a Monty Python TV skit that pays obnoxiously repetitive tribute in song to Hormel's canned-meat product). Last year 45% of e-mail users said they deleted messages from unfamiliar sources immediately, according to Internet marketing agency Doubleclick. Today it's 60%. Corporate marketers, fearful that consumers will trash their ads along with the come-ons for porn sites and Nigerian get-rich-quick scams, are frantically trying to set themselves apart. "We're very, very concerned about the mass proliferation of spam," says Jim Conway, head of government relations for the Direct Marketing Association. "It hurts our industry."

Tom Cowles, however, objects to the notion that he is ruining the e-mail marketplace. Fingered on a perp list of top spammers worldwide by watchdog group Spamhaus.org , Cowles, 35, runs Empire Towers Corp., based in Bowling Green, Ohio. The 5 billion e-mail ads his company spews each month include offers for nutritional supplements and window and siding installation. ("I don't do porn," he says.) He won't name his "several hundred" corporate clients, but says they include 10 publicly traded companies. It's a living, and then some. Cowles has 60 employees in Ohio, Nevada, Florida and Texas, and says his company made $12 million in sales last year.

The bottom line is this: as long as a sliver of e-mail users click through to investigate those work-at-home opportunities and other come-ons, the great majority of users will continue to be barraged by spam. "I do see the argument that if a consumer gets 100 e-mails a day, you get numb to it," admits Cowles, who claims he de-lists "chronic complainers." But spam "will only die out when it's no longer going to be profitable." Or when enough roadblocks pop up. Internet service providers routinely try to thwart spammers, some by taking them to court. Verizon last week won a settlement from prolific spammer Alan Ralsky, barring him from e-mailing Verizon's 1.6 million Internet users ever again.

In any case, tighter marketing budgets and the scramble to boost business will increasingly blur the line between e-mail marketing and spam. Companies are quietly stepping up efforts to sneak into your In box by acquiring lists of addresses from marketing partners or dangling sweepstakes to get you to register your address. "Some very respectable companies come to us with a list of postal addresses they currently send direct mail to, and ask us for the people's e-mails," says Michael Mayor, president of e-mail list managers NetCreations, who says he refuses to sell those e-mail addresses.

But others aren't so persnickety. When Internet-based retailer Toysmart went bankrupt in 2000, it tried to pay off some creditors by selling its customers' e-mail addresses and retreated only when the Federal Trade Commission filed suit. Earlier this year, popular Internet portal Yahoo changed the terms of its privacy agreements (as AOL and eBay had done earlier) to allow it to send e-mail offers to registered members unless they specified otherwise.

While 26 states have antispam laws, the direct-marketing industry has lobbied to keep tough federal legislation off the books. "Any legal limits on spammers might also limit other direct marketers," says David Sorkin, an associate professor at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago who runs watchdog group Spamlaws.com . "They don't want to lose the right to prospect for new customers by e-mail."

For now, most consumers seem resigned to wielding the delete button to separate spam from other messages they want. But the war has moved to a new front: cell phones. Rodney Joffe, a founder of Web host Genuity, whose current ventures include an e-mail-marketing company, was enjoying a performance of Riverdance in a Phoenix, Ariz., theater early last year when he got spammed via a text message a promotion from a mortgage company on his phone. Cell-phone providers typically charge their customers to receive e-mail. "So not only was I getting spammed, I was paying for it," fumes Joffe, 47. He slammed the offending marketer with a lawsuit, which he won at the trial level. (The mortgage company is appealing.)