Spam Hits Some Anti-Spammers, Who Think They Have a Culprit
Tens of thousands of readers of e-mail newsletters have recently been inundated with unsolicited overtures from pornography Web sites and get-rich-quick schemes, the newsletter publishers say, and they are blaming the company that manages and distributes the newsletters for them.

Particularly galling to some of the publishers is that the newsletters they send out are about ways to use e-mail to market responsibly and about the dangers of sending unsolicited e-mail, known as spam.

The publishers are blaming a company called SparkLIST.com, which offers services they use to distribute their e-mail newsletters. The reason for the accusation is that the spam has been sent to private, otherwise undisclosed e-mail addresses that are used only to receive the publishers' newsletters.

"The 10,000 people using our newsletter are now getting porno spam, and they think it's coming from me," said Andy Sernovitz, who runs GasPedal Ventures, a New York company that consults on using e-mail as a marketing tool. "I am freaking out."

Publishers are asking whether the database at SparkLIST, which is operated from Green Bay, Wis., has been broken into by hackers or otherwise compromised.

But there is no proof that the database has been breached, according to Lyris Technologies, a maker of software for anti-spam and e-mail marketing software; Lyris acquired SparkLIST in August. Steven Brown, the chief operating officer for Lyris, based in Berkeley, Calif., said the spammers might not have stolen the database at all but might instead have acquired the addresses some other way.

For instance, he said, they may be using computer programs that randomly generate e-mail addresses that, coincidentally, include addresses that belong to recipients of the newsletters. "We're trying to figure out where this has come from," Mr. Brown said.

Mr. Sernovitz and other customers of SparkLIST, which says it sends out 750 million e-mail messages on behalf of clients each month, say they are not sure what happened to SparkLIST's database, but they speculate that it has been broken into by hackers or that the data has been stolen by an employee.

The flood of unsolicited messages to recipients of the newsletters, which have hundreds of thousands of readers, comes at a time when the amount of unsolicited e-mail is already exploding. The Radicati Group, a market research group in Palo Alto, Calif., estimated earlier this year that 32 percent of the 7.3 billion e-mail messages sent each day were unsolicited commercial messages.

But the issue takes on added significance in the case of SparkLIST because a handful of SparkLIST's clients are among the best-known publishers and consultants who preach the responsible use of e-mail for marketing. Mr. Sernovitz, for instance, started the Association of Interactive Marketing, an early anti-spam organization.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/12/technology/12MAIL.html