Free Spam Kings by Brian S McWilliams Page B

message to
     " [email protected] " with the word "UNSUBSCRIBE" in the subject
     field. We apologize if you have received this email in error .
    As a further countermeasure against complaint-related interruptions, Hawke decided to
     switch mailing programs. He'd received a spam advertising a package called Extractor
     Pro, which, according to its web site, was designed to send ads onto the Internet
     through third-party mail servers known as open relays. These machines, usually operated by
     businesses, universities, and other organizations, had been configured (either out of
     courtesy or neglect) to allow unauthorized users to bounce their messages off the servers en
     route to their final destinations. As a result, recipients of the messages who examined the
     headers could trace their origin back to the open relays but usually not to the sender's
     ISP. Hawke purchased and downloaded a copy of Extractor Pro from the company's web
     site.
    On October 20, 1999, Hawke was ready to broadcast his new ad for Publishing Company in a
     Box. He signed on to Carol.net and configured Extractor Pro to use the half-million fresh
     email addresses that came with the program.
    Meanwhile, nearly five hundred miles away in Washington, D.C., Heather Wilson, a
     republican from New Mexico, was introducing the Unsolicited Electronic Mail Act of
     1999to the U.S. House of Representatives. If enacted into law, the bill would
     require email marketers to use real return addresses on their messages, provide opt-out
     features, and abstain from forging their messages' headers. A failure to comply could open
     them up to private lawsuits from individuals or ISPs to the tune of five hundred dollars per
     infringing message.
    But Hawke wasn't paying attention to national news, much less to pending federal
     legislation. After double-checking to make sure Extractor Pro had successfully connected to
     a set of relay servers, he took a deep breath and pushed the program's start button.
     Tomorrow, the 21 st , he would turn twenty-one—his golden birthday.
     Who knew what it might bring?

Chapter 3. 
    Shiksaa Meets the Cyanide Idiot
    Jason Vale was in big trouble. For nearly two hours he'd been trapped in a windowless
     conference room in the U.S. Attorney's office in Brooklyn. A government lawyer was grilling
     Vale, 29, about his Internet-based apricot seed business, which he operated from his home in
     Queens, New York. It was April 2000, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)had been after Vale's company, Christian Brothers Contracting Corporation,
     since 1997, when they sent inspectors to his home.
    It was just a deposition, but Vale felt like he was already on trial. He really needed
     to use the bathroom, but his interrogator—a woman in her mid-twenties—wouldn't let
     up.
    "How would you characterize your feeling, your religious beliefs in relation to the work
     that you do?" asked Allison Harnisch, a trial lawyer with the Department of Justice's Office
     of Consumer Litigation. [ 1 ]
    Vale wasn't certain where she was going with the question, but he lurched into his
     standard answer about how Genesis 1:29 contained a prescription for life without
     cancer:
    Then God said, "I now give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the
     entire earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for
     food."
    There are way too many lawyers in this room , Vale thought. Besides
     Assistant U.S. Attorney Harnisch, there was Vale's lawyer, another attorney from the
     Department of Justice, and one from the FDA. Vale was just an online entrepreneur, filling
     orders in his basement for bags of apricot seeds; tablets of the extract from the seeds
     called Laetrile, or vitamin B 17 ; as well as an injected form of the
     compound. He used several computers to send out email advertisements for his web sites,
     which included apricotsfromgod.com and canceranswer.com. In its 1998 suit against him, AOL
     claimed