desist. He had, he said, bought my address as part of a list that had been represented to him as consisting of people who were interested in receiving this type of material. He would be taking it up with his supplier, Mailstar, whose Web address he helpfully enclosed. There must be many more like him, who paid for a service in good faith out of ignorance of the Net and its ways, and who were simply taken in by people who figured out that the best way to Get Rich Quick was to get others to pay them up front.

Mailstar turned out to be small fry; the big fish in the polluted pond was Philadelphia-based Cyber Promotions, which in September 1996 went into court after America Online (AOL) began blocking all email sent from any of its known domains.[29] Cyber Promotions won a temporary restraining order requiring AOL to lift the block, but by early October this ruling was lifted and AOL instituted user-controllable blocking facilities that users could disable if they wanted to receive junk email. Sanford Wallace, the president of Cyber Promotions, made a brief foray onto news.admin.net-abuse.misc in late September, "Just to talk." His discussions with the assembled system administrators, spam cancelers, and irate Netheads made an entertaining spectacle--if you're the kind of person who likes to read Usenet wearing an asbestos vest.[30]

On the newsgroup, as on the company's Web site,[31] Wallace reiterated that many users wanted to receive his company's material and argued that blocking his mailings was censorship and an issue of freedom of speech. The Web site also boasted a collection of email messages (since removed) from AOL users dissatisfied with the company's new policy of mail controls on just those grounds. But there is another freedom of speech issue that Wallace doesn't mention, namely, the fact that a growing number of Net users are deterred from posting to public areas for fear that their email addresses will be snaffled up by the bulk emailers and added to the lists. (To protect themselves from automated address collection software, in early 1997 Usenet posters began editing the reply email addresses on their postings; by August junk email was advertising software to remove the most common edits.)

There is also the small point that most of the junk emailers--though not necessarily the businesses, many of them not Net-literate, whose ads they get paid to send out--know that what they're doing is contrary to acceptable practice. For one thing, whatever they claim in the ads they send out for their own services, their lists are not targeted at all, as far as I can tell, beyond rejecting academic addresses (identifiable by the ending .edu). It's routine for messages advertising U.S.-only services to arrive in large numbers of mailboxes at *.co.uk addresses. You would think that the simplest targeting software would check for country identifiers.

And yet, when an email message lands in your mailbox with a note "You have been chosen to receive this because your name appears on a list of those interested in such material," people's first reaction is to believe there really is such a list and that their names really are on it. In October 1996, a message saying just that hit perhaps a couple of million spooked users worldwide. It advertised child pornography--videos, customized audiotapes, pictures--for sale. It was almost certainly a hoax designed to cause lots of trouble for the guy whose name and address appeared at the bottom. In countries such as Britain, where possession of any type of child pornography is illegal and police may search without a warrant under some circumstances, it terrified people.

For another thing, ads for bulk email software all promise systems for filtering out flame and other angry responses. If their lists were so carefully targeted, why would they need to do this? More than that, many offer to do the emailing for you to protect your own Internet account from cancellation. Shortly after AOL restarted its blocking policy, Cyber Promotions got hauled into court by CompuServe and Concentric Network, a San Jose-based ISP, for forging its message headers to make it appear that its bulk email was coming from those systems. In early