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March 5, 2005

Where's the outrage?

One comment I frequently get from people after reading Spam Kings is, "Wow. I can't believe these guys are so determined!"

They're talking about the anti-spammers depicted in the book -- not the spammers!

Many people today think fighting spam is all about filters and blacklists and lawsuits. But, as I chronicle in the book, there was a time when people actually took to the streets to express their disapproval of spamming.

Click here to view "vintage" photos of members of the Forum for Responsible and Ethical Email (FREE) picketing RealNetworks in 1999 (as described in chapter six of Spam Kings).

(Anti-spammers wanted to convince RealNetworks to stop automatically sending ads to people who downloaded its media player, and instead to ask users' permission to send them spam.)

Nowadays, spam is at record levels, but instead of generating outrage, it's becoming accepted as a fact of online life.

As a result, we end up with articles bemoaning the imperfectness of spam filters, as though email administrators -- not spammers -- were to blame for the unreliability of email.

Posted by brian at March 5, 2005 6:16 PM