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But for an increasing number of Hirsch's imitators, spamming is a numbers game that rewards excess. "The more times they deliver the message, the more money they make," says Charles Curran, general counsel for America Online, which last week filed lawsuits against more than 100 spammers. "They all want to get as close to infinity as possible." This is getting easier all the time, as high-speed Internet access gets cheaper and computer processor power continues to double every 16 months. Meanwhile, the software tools for spamming continue to improve. Web crawlers harvest e-mail addresses en masse from chat rooms and newsgroups. Dictionary-attack programs string together words or names in multiple languages, random numbers, an "@" and the names of common mail servers. Presto: millions of likely e-mail addresses.
Spoofing--the practice of faking the return address of a spam, so you won't be able to trace who sent it, or the subject line, so you will open it--just complicates things further. Today, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), 66% of spam are spoofs of one sort or another. Brian Westby, a porn-website owner based in St. Louis, Mo., was a classic spoofer: the subjects for his Xrated spam included "Good evening," "What's going on?" and "Please resend the email." Westby's spam deluged a bank in Santa Barbara, Calif., and an Internet service provider in Coatesville, Pa., some of whose clients angrily canceled their service. The FTC finally got a federal judge in Chicago to shut down Westby's operation. A trial is pending.
Spoofed or otherwise, the spam that makes it to your In box is just the tip of the iceberg. At the four major e-mail providers--MSN (including Hotmail), Yahoo, EarthLink and AOL (which, like this magazine, is owned by AOL Time Warner)--between 40% and 70% of all incoming mail is killed upon arrival at their mail servers. But this has spawned a kind of spam arms race: the more mail is blocked, the more spammers send, in hopes that some will get through. As a result, the performance of the mail servers is starting to suffer. Two months ago, 8% of MSN mail was spam. Today it's 50%. "The rate of spam," warns MSN business manager Kevin Doerr, "is threatening the viability of e-mail as a communications medium."
Automated antispam software can only do so much, so the four e-mail giants have started to employ a new weapon: humans. People, it seems, learn the rules of this new battlefield faster than machines do. At AOL's new control facility in Gainesville, Va., home to its antispam special-forces unit, workers like Anna Ford scan screens that show blocks of mail entering the system. She's looking, Matrix-like, for suspicious patterns. "Here's someone sending 50 e-mails to 3,000 recipients," says Ford. "That stinks." With one click, the sender is identified as a China-based spammer; with another, he is banished from the system. Is there room for human error? Possibly--but letting such high-volume users through, says AOL antispam manager Charles Stiles, "would be like a bank welcoming customers in ski masks."