A Clearwater software company is having a hard time shaking its reputation as a spammer.
By DAVE GUSSOW
Published May 17, 2004
To Kevin Moberly, Stu Sjouwerman is an unrepentant serial spammer. To Sjouwerman, people like Moberly are no more than online vigilantes out to censor the Net.
Even more galling to Moberly is that Sjouwerman, the founder and chief operating officer of Sunbelt Software in Clearwater, has gained notice and makes money by selling IHateSpam, a software filter for junk e-mail.
"I used to send him complaint letters when I got spam," said Moberly, who is working on a doctorate at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and participates in an online antispam news group. "He's just among the many. He's just symptomatic of the problem."
Just as frustrating to Sjouwerman is that the news group (news.admin.net-abuse.email) and online spam blacklists refuse to recognize that he and Sunbelt learned a lesson from mistakes made during the Internet's formative years. He fights spam now, doesn't send it, he says.
But once something is posted on the Internet, it's there forever. "People who are completely innocent are being censored," Sjouwerman said. "You are a victim of someone's opinion whether you are a spammer or not."
While Sunbelt and its adversaries have been going at it for years, the skirmish reflects the intensity with which consumers and businesses are trying to cope with the rising tide of spam.
Moberly abandoned an e-mail account to try to avoid the junk, and Sjouwerman posted an explanation on Sunbelt's Web site (www.sunbelt-software.com/rbl_story.htm) to tell his side of the story.
But spam is becoming more than just a minor annoyance. As people receive more spam, they are beginning to identify all e-mail as junk, according to a study by Jupiter Research. "Consumer inattention is leading to overlooked or deleted legitimate e-mail," the report said.
It is hindering the effectiveness and driving up costs for legitimate marketing campaigns, Jupiter says. Businesses are getting complaints even from customers who have chosen to receive e-mail marketing messages.
Sjouwerman blames some of those factors for his problems in being listed at antispam sites such as Spamhaus and SPEWS (Spam Prevention Early Warning System).
People can forget they signed up to receive pitches, he says, or maybe agreed to receive material from another company that shares a database with a business partner. It could be real spam, it could be a vendetta, he says. But he doesn't think that a lot of people complain about Sunbelt.
Companies "wind up on some blacklist completely at the mercy of some self-styled Internet sheriffs who essentially are taking the law into their own hands," he said. "If you do a lot of Internet marketing, as we do, our newsletters go to hundreds of thousands of people, and a few people scream bloody murder."
While the rhetoric may be escalating, both Moberly and Sjouwerman are low-key when discussing the problem.
Moberly teaches technical writing and is working on a degree in English literature with a concentration in rhetoric. "I'm trying to figure out why it makes me so angry to get it," Moberly said. "It's like my e-mail has been turned into a porn department."
Moberly mostly observes the news group now, concerned that its tone has become increasingly angry. And he worries that spam is killing e-mail.
"There's a lot of really bad argument going on," he said. "Even the people involved get really angry posts. I don't think spammers consider the anger it causes. They tend to say that people who are angry are a minority and we're nut cases."
When he sees stories quoting Sjouwerman as an antispam expert, his blood pressure rises. He concedes that Sunbelt's spam has subsided in recent years, but it bothers him that Sunbelt spammed, then profited from selling its software to fix the problem.
For Sjouwerman, though, "that would be an incorrect observation." In the mid 1990s, he says, Sunbelt used a system of "opt-out" for e-mail, a standard format in those days.
That means the company would send e-mail to everyone on its mailing lists. People who didn't want it would have to send back a note to unsubscribe. That's how the company got listed on the antispam sites, but it's not how it operates now, Sjouwerman says.
Currently, Sunbelt uses an "opt-in" system, he says. People who want to receive the company's e-mail newsletters and product offers have to agree to receive them.
In particular, Sjouwerman says sites such as Spamhaus and SPEWS are arbitrary and unfair. They maintain lists of Internet protocol addresses known to be used by spammers. Some Internet service providers use the lists to block e-mail.
Spamhaus collects spam in special mailbox traps. The addresses are secret and unavailable to any permission-based service. If e-mail ends up in the trap, Spamhaus says, it's likely being generated by programs that send messages to random addresses. And that's spam.
The last note about Sunbelt at SPEWS from January 2003 noted "no spam for some time, listings modified." But at Spamhaus, Sunbelt's listing was reactivated in February.
"Despite many, many attempts by many people to teach Stu Sjouwerman the virtues of opt-in, he just can't keep his hand out of the spam tin," the site says.
The conflict hasn't affected business, Sjouwerman says, and in fact the company is enjoying robust growth. He attributes it to its main business of providing system administrators with software products that help them maintain their systems. It expects revenues this year of $30-million, up from $25-million last year.
But whether Sunbelt is a spammer, the two sides are not close to agreement:
"The thing is," Moberly said, "once a spammer, always a spammer."
As for Sjouwerman: "We hate spam just as much as anyone else."
- Information from Times wires was used in this report. Dave Gussow can be reached at gussow@sptimes.com or 727 771-4328.
