Interview with a spammer

You almost certainly got the offer in your inbox a year ago this week: A copy of the "Iraq's Most Wanted" playing cards created by the Pentagon. Yours for only $5.95.

One of the entrepreneurs hawking the cards was OptInRealBig.com founder Scott Richter, who sold 40,000 decks the first week -- before they were even printed.

Richter is a rarity: a spammer willing to show his face and give interviews.  Last year, Details magazine placed him on a list of "Ten Most Influential and Powerful Men Under 38," along with Ben Affleck and Eminem.

Richter is quick to differentiate himself from the spammer hordes, however: "What we do is opt-in e-mail marketing," he says via speakerphone from his Denver-area office. "We're not the underground spammer who sends out the Viagra ad spelled incorrectly."

Richter is currently being sued by the State of New York's Attorney General for sending advertisements to Hotmail members that violated federal deceptive marketing laws, including misleading subject lines and faked sender's addresses. Richter claims a subcontractor sent the messages. "Everything we send out has our address on it. It all comes from our domain space," he says. Either way, Richter's got quite an operation going. The New York suit claims OptInRealBig.com is the third most prolific ad mailer on the Net. Richter doesn't deny that the company sends 50 to 250 million messages per day.

Charging roughly $200 per million messages, the company pulls in two million dollars a month in revenue advertising everything from Iraq's Most Wanted to the inevitable male supplements. "As long as it doesn't bring any lawsuit, I don't care," Richter says. "I'm not going to send out child porn, but we have an opt-in list. If people have verified that they want to get offers, and they're over 18, we're not doing anything illegal."

Whether the court finds that true or not, the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 seems to be the one anti-spam approach Richter likes. "Now we don't have 50 states passing new laws every hour," he says. "But the only people [prosecutors] can find are people in the United States doing it properly," he says. "We can't catch a terrorist with a $25 million bounty on his head. How are we gonna catch a guy on a dial-up in Turkey?"

Moreover, he claims anti-spammers aren't being up front about their own business interests. "Why don't they have a do-not-mail list for the U.S. Postal Service? [Junk mail] kills trees; it causes trash you have to pay for. The difference is the government doesn't get a piece of the action for e-mail. And what would Brightmail and Postini do if there was a law tomorrow that said 'no more spam or you go to jail?' It's a political game." The Radicati Group estimates that in 2004, spammers will book $3.5 billion in revenues, but the market for anti-spam software will come close to a billion dollars itself.

Rather than just hawking filterware, Bill Gates has recently thrown his lot in with academics who tout computational penalties -- such as 10 seconds of CPU time for each unsolicited message. Richter says that would still let him sell ads for pricier products. Moreover, he doubts the plan could be implemented. "How's he going to get someone in China to play to his values on that? If it were that easy, we'd finally have a world money system. When he can figure out how to keep Windows from crashing, then he can go do more stuff."