''Click here,'' says my spamming mentor. Hovering over my chair, he points to the computer screen. ''Now click on that file of e-mail addresses there.'' I have been invited by a master for an education in spamming, the practice of blasting millions of unsolicited e-mail messages into the Internet in order to advertise everything from loans with easy terms to women of easy virtue. ''Let's go online and download some software,'' says my guide. His name is Richard Colbert. On the Rokso, or Register of Known Spam Operations (a kind of Most Wanted List for the Internet posted on an antispam Web site called spamhaus.org), Colbert is described plainly: ''Nonstop scam spammer, kicked off so many hosts and I.S.P.s'' -- or Internet service providers -- ''it's hard to count.'' Dressed in blue shorts and a purple T-shirt, Colbert, 31, has blondish hair stuffed under a baseball cap, a prominent diamond earring and a mild twang that betrays his Atlanta origin. He lights up a Monarch menthol as he shows me his computer room, an intimate homemade space built off the side of an aging two-tone mobile home -- robin's-egg blue and white -- which sits among hundreds of Airstreams and Miami Deco single-wides in the Sunset Colony Mobile Home Park in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Colbert claims that he's now on a sabbatical from spamming, but he's watching current events and weighing a return. During this interlude, he has agreed to help me learn how the avalanche of solicitations I receive winds up in my online mailbox every day. Who are these guys? Who hires them? How do they get legitimate e-mail addresses? And finally, can federal legislation currently under consideration actually stop them? First off, Colbert doesn't think about spam the way I do (or, most probably, the way you do). He likes to call it ''bulk e-mailing,'' for starters. And he considers it just one of the many exciting new markets available on the Internet. He's the kind of guy who is always interrupting himself to tell you about some smart economic angle he has figured out, some new edge. ''These shorts are Dockers,'' he says, pointing at the clothes he has on. ''And I got them off eBay. Shirt? Tommy Hilfiger. EBay. Shoes? Nikes. EBay.'' Colbert and I dig around on the Internet until, under his direction, I find a piece of software that allows for mass e-mailing. These are common and legal, used legitimately by professional archaeologists, say, or chess enthusiasts to form an online group and conduct chats or exchange information. Right away there's a problem. The software we've selected requires registration or payment. But Colbert says he once used this very piece of software, slightly altered, when he worked with some other spammers who live nearby. So he snatches his phone and calls a neighbor for support. A minute later, we are back in business. It turns out that an unusually large number of spammers live in this area, the stretch of beaches north of Miami that old-timers loosely call Boca and new-timers know as a staging ground for the smarmier characters in Carl Hiaasen's novels. According to Steve Linford, who maintains the Rokso list, there's a good reason that so many spammers wind up on Spam Beach: ''Boca Raton is where they used to run those pump-and-dump investment scams and where the telemarketing sweatshops are.'' The phone scammers and infomercial wannabes of the 80's and 90's -- who themselves supplanted the land speculators who established Florida's earliest cities upon shifting sand and sinking swamps -- have been pushed aside by the new boys on the block, the bulk e-mailers of the Internet. 2. A SPAMMING PRIMER How does a spammer obtain a million working e-mail addresses? Most simply, there are lists you can buy off the Internet. But there are also other, cheaper, ways. A ''dictionary attack,'' Colbert instructs, is when you blast reams of computer-generated potential e-mail names (Arnie1@hotmail.com, Arnie2@hotmail.com, Arnie3@hotmail.com . . .) and see which ones take. Another good tool is called a spider, a software program that can crawl through Web pages, looking for that telltale symbol: @. Then it simply records everything to the left and right of it, and bingo, it has a good e-mail address. (A good method for avoiding spam, then, is to always type your e-mail address on the Web this way: Arnie at hotmail.com or ArnieREMOVETHIS@hotmail.com. Humans can look at either and figure out what to do; software -- so far -- is helpless.) Sitting at Richard's computer, I set out to launch my first spam. I append a file of e-mail addresses to the software along with my cover letter -- my spam. To keep everything vaguely legal, my spam is nothing more than a cheerful holiday greeting, at the end of which is a link to bowieltd.com, one of Colbert's Web sites. [align=right] tl;dr ;_; [i]Rx[/i] [/align]

Last edited by dheetiij's (2008-09-25 09:16:58)