Ever wonder how a certain company sending unsolicited e-mail messages got your address?

Michael Rathbun, the director of policy enforcement at Allegiance Telecom, an Internet service provider in Dallas, says he thinks he has much of the answer.

Some five years ago, Mr. Rathbun bought a Palm hand-held organizer and, in registering it on Palm's Web site, gave the company an e-mail address he never used for anything else. Initially his in-box received only offers for products related to the organizer, but eventually he started getting advertising from some well-known companies like Bank of America, SBC Communications and Sprint. Lately, that one address alone has been receiving dozens of e-mails a month offering everything from travel clubs to acne remedies.

"This is not stuff," Mr. Rathbun said, "that I should be getting from them."

The problem of spam or unwanted commercial e-mail is usually attributed to outlaws and hucksters — peddlers of pornography, get-rich-quick schemes and pills of dubious merit — who use hackers to send their fraudulent messages in ways that cannot be traced.

But the torrent of spam that is flowing into people's electronic mailboxes comes not only from the sewers but also from the office towers of the biggest and most well-known corporations.

Established companies insist they send e-mail only to people who have voluntarily agreed to receive marketing offers. A spokeswoman for Palm says it does not know how Mr. Rathbun's e-mail address got into the hands of spammers and says it has never sold its customer list.

But often companies rent e-mail lists from a cottage industry that has emerged to lure Internet users, through a variety of schemes, into signing up for e-mail marketing.

At best, if you have ever entered a contest to win a prize, subscribed to an online newsletter or simply purchased a product on the Web, you may well have also agreed, as many such fine-print contracts put it, "to receive valuable offers from our marketing partners."

This practice falls under the rubric of what is called opt-in marketing, or getting permission to send advertising messages.

But many e-mail executives admit that these same list companies also add to their databases by buying, trading — sometimes even stealing — names.

"Everyone is looking for a quick buck now, and people are claiming to sell opt-in data who don't have it," said Pesach Lattin, who runs Adspyre, a New York e-mail marketing firm.

Moreover, some companies have allowed the e-mail addresses of their own customers, either deliberately or inadvertently, to fall into the hands of list peddlers who in turn sell them to e-mail marketers of all stripes. Sometimes, the lists are stolen from corporate owners by employees or vendors looking to make a quick profit. But in many cases, the big companies are deliberately buying and selling access to names, relying on privacy policies — often hard to find on their sites — that they say permit such actions.

"White-collar spam" is how Nick Usborne, a newsletter writer and Internet marketing consultant, refers to this phenomenon.

"When a responsible company," Mr. Usborne said, "gets someone to sign up for a newsletter and says, now that we have their e-mail address let's make more money off it and send them e-mail they didn't ask for, that's white-collar spam."

The antispam bill passed unanimously by the Senate last week imposes tough penalties on people involved in the lowest forms of spam but it does not deal with the central questions Mr. Usborne and others raise about white-collar spam. It does nothing, for example, to establish rules defining an appropriate list of names that a purveyor of a legitimate product can use to send an offer by e-mail. Nor does it regulate the transfer of names between companies.

The law would require that every e-mail message offer recipients a method to remove themselves from an advertiser's mailing list. But with the way that names are traded today, this method would do little to reduce the amount of e-mail people receive, industry executives say.

"People don't realize that once you sign up for a contest or free stuff on the Web and you forget to uncheck a box, these people will pass your name to a hundred other people,'` said Paul Nute, a partner of Soho Digital, a New York advertising agency that represents e-mail marketers. "You've just raised your hand and said, `Send me the diet pill offers.' And there is no way to get them all to stop."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/28/technology/28SPAM.html?pagewanted=all&position=