Spammers choking the Web

Samuel Meltzer has a title that doesn't show up on any business card.

Meltzer, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission, is a "professional Internet spammer." Together with his brother, Adam, Meltzer has one of the more prolific spam operations in the country.

The Minnesota men settled an anti-spamming suit filed against them by Washington state last year, and in February, the SEC accused Samuel Meltzer of sending millions of unsolicited e-mails as part of a scheme to fraudulently promote at least a dozen obscure stocks.

A well-known tracker of spam senders, the British nonprofit Spamhaus Project, ranks the Meltzers among its top 140 "hard-line spam operations" that together generate about 90 percent of the spam that fills e-mail in-boxes in North America and Europe.

The brothers are the face of a phenomenon that threatens to undermine the utility of e-mail, one of the Internet's simplest, most useful creations.

Unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail — spam — promoting everything from pornography and home mortgages to Viagra, herbal medicines and penis enlargement, are clogging up in-boxes in a way few could have imagined even a year ago.

Brightmail Inc., a San Francisco-based provider of spam-filtering software that serves six of the 10 largest U.S. Internet service providers, estimates that 46 percent of all e-mail traffic in April was spam, based on its customer base of 250 million e-mail users, most of them in North America.

That was up from 18 percent in April 2002 and 10 percent in October 2001. AOL said recently that it blocks 2.3 billion e-mail spams a day.

"We're at a tipping point," said Jason Catlett, president of the New Jersey privacy advocacy firm Junkbusters Corp.

Samuel Meltzer declined to be interviewed; his brother couldn't be reached for comment. Samuel Meltzer is in talks with the SEC; Adam Meltzer was not named in the SEC action.

Samuel Meltzer's lawyer, Daniel Boivin, said that his client's business is much the same as telemarketing or direct mail. Boivin said spamming occurs because at least part of the population responds to the ads.