Amongst many wonderful things, e-mail has given us Spam—unwanted solicitations that come to us over the Internet to supplement the unwanted solicitations we get via the post office and telephone. To most users, Spam is as lovable as a rabid skunk and as welcome as a politician.

What sort of person would earn a living Spamming his her fellow users? How could an allegedly human being sink so low? Where is the dung heap out of which would crawl an individual so wretched as to be scorned by those who earn an honest living breaking into parking meters?

To find out how, we spoke with Fred Flinflam, who, through his company Flinflam Spam Jam, sends out more unsolicited e-mail than any other living person.

Lincoln Spector: Fred, hundreds of companies hire you to sell their wares online. In fact, you may be the person most responsible for all of the Spam to which the wired public is regularly subjected. In light of all this, how do you sleep at night?

Fred Flinflam: My success is based on a very simple principle: In order to sell your product to a sufficiently large group of potential customers, you have to irritate a whole lot more. That involves acquiring as many email addresses as possible. We use various methods, including harvesting addresses from Usenet, searching the Web for mailto links, and strong-arming ISPs. Of course, we have no knowledge of the quality of these addresses, an important issue because 30% of our income comes from selling email addresses.

The first thing we do with new addresses is send out an "Everybody Hates Spam" message. For ten dollars, we promise to help you stamp out Spam. When someone sends us the money, we send them some literature from The American Association of People Opposed to Packaged Meats. Then we put the new customer on our quality list to receive more messages.

LS: Now let me get this straight. If someone explicitly tells you that they don’t want to receive Spam, you send them more Spam? With a policy like that, how do you sleep at night?

FF: Well, sending them a message isn’t enough. You have to get them to read your message. And the best way to do that is to lie to them.

The email subject field is the key. Remember our campaign for the Flaxomatic Get-Rich-Quick Scheme? Of course you do. You personally received that message 87 times. The first time we mailed it, the subject was relatively honest: "Get Rich Quick." It certainly described what the scheme was doing for me. Of course, we knew that no one who rejected it the first time would open that message again. So we kept varying the subject—"Important Financial Information," "The Ultimate in Sexual Satisfaction," "Are Our Plans Still On For Saturday Night?"

LS: So basically, you’ll say anything to get people to open their mail. It seems to me that you’d simply get people angry and unwilling to do business with you. But what I really wonder is how do you sleep at night?

FF: Once someone opens a message, there has to be something compelling that will grab their attention. Take one very successful campaign we ran recently. Whatever the subject read, the first line of the actual message was always " Know anyone even more annoying than this message?" Who could read that and not go on?

Once we had them hooked, we described all the other reasons to use our client’s services—difficult spouse, large inheritance that’s not yet yours, whiney journalists always asking about your sleeping habits. Then we gave a tantalizing glimpse of the variety of services being offered, and ended with Murder Online’s URL and 800 number.

Of course, our deal with Murder Online included a clause that they would not honor any contracts put out on me.

LS: You’ve certainly had some interesting clients: Murder Online, CrashNBurn Airlines, the House of Representatives. While you probably make them all very happy, your work is disastrous for ISPs. They’re the ones who have to contend with a huge load of unwanted messages clogging up their pipeline. With all of the bandwidth problems you cause these companies, how do you sleep at night?

FF: Bandwidth across the Internet keeps increasing, and we’re learning to use it all. In fact, we’re especially excited about the growing acceptance of HTML as a standard for formatted email.

For instance, we’re working right now on a formatted-email campaign for Suzie’s Hot House of Horizontal Happiness. Each message will contain large type, a hot pink background, and six giant jpegs of absolutely wild action—and we’re going to send this message to every man, woman, and child in the world. The complete message will be about half a meg in size, so that the download alone is sure to peak people’s interest.

HTML gives us another advantage. As soon as someone opens the message, it will automatically launch their Web browser and take them to Suzie’s Web site. This is an absolutely vital feature, since Suzie is paying us by the click-through.

LS: Why am I not surprised? One more question: How do you sleep at night?

FF: On very expensive sheets.

© Copyright 1999 by Lincoln Spector

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