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Privacy Your Rights Online

DoubleClick Gets Into Spam 391

Posted by timothy from the now-with-50-percent-more-evil dept.
keytoe writes: "Well, just when we thought everyone's favorite Privacy Snoop was starting to mellow out a bit, we discover this little tidbit. DoubleClick is now branching out from the ad serving business into the SPAM business due to the fact that direct email marketing 'is one of the few forms of Internet advertising that is thriving.' Using DARTmail, you can now target your bulk mailings 'based on profile data.' I wonder which profiling data they're talking about. Perhaps, say, all the data they've been collecting for years?"
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DoubleClick Gets Into Spam More

DoubleClick Gets Into Spam

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  • so! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by prizzznecious ( 551920 )
    Remember: complain about spam all you like, but the problem is that the spam is effective. Click banner ads etc. if you really hate spam, so that advertisers have a worthwhile alternative. Either that or kill the people who buy products from vendors who spam. The internet is too good of an opportunity to pass up; people will always want to make money off of it.

    • Re:so! (Score:2, Interesting)

      by zzyzx ( 15139 )
      Who the heck buys anything off of spam. The one common denominator of spam is that almost everything advertised that way is something that you would never want. If I got spam telling me about really good deals on blank cds, legitimately discounted airfare, and vegetarian resturants in Seattle, I wouldn't mind spam nearly as much. However it's always Make Money Fast, Nigeran scams, sketchy sounding health stuff, and the ilk.
      • Don't forget spy software, bad credit removals, mortgage refinancing. Who the hell trusts their credit and/or their HOME to a spammer?

      • Prey upon the Stupid (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Bonker ( 243350 )
        Who the heck buys anything off of spam.

        You'd be surprised.

        I recently spent several weeks doing my best to convince the people in my company's marketing department that they could not start sending unsolicited commercial email to potential customers.

        My arguments were the familiar reasons why USCE is so evil. Their arguments amounted to "Everyone else is doing it, so why can't we?"

        To this day, I have to tell my father-in-law about once a week that the "money-making business idea" he's found out about through a 'helpful email' is in actuality a get-rick-quick scheme, a pyramid scam or something similiar.

        Scarily enough, Spam *does* work. The people in my marketing deparment all have degrees! True, that doesn't say anything about their intelligence, but they had enough common sense to pass enough tests, (or kiss enough ass) to get through college sucessfully. To the more stupid, or those unprepared to deal with blatant profiteerism-- quite a few Spams prey on the eldery, trying to get them to 'invest' their social security checks-- Spam is a deadly trap.

        What's the saying? It was in an article on evolution a few weeks ago. Went something like:

        "Natural selection favors those who are too stupid to use birth control."

      • Re:so! (Score:3, Funny)

        by Zeinfeld ( 263942 )
        Who the heck buys anything off of spam

        Hah! Ever since a Nigerian businessman dumped $38 million in my bank account and we split the proceeds 50:50 I have never bought porn or printer cartidges any other way

    • Spam isn't effective - market forces don't apply (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Philbert Desenex ( 219355 ) on Monday February 25, 2002 @04:16PM (#3066621) Homepage

      I don't see that you can say "Spam is effective" with a straight face.

      Canter & Siegal, the original Usenet spammers, gave it up after a year or so. Sanford Wallace, one of the most unrepentant spammers, with a history going back to fax spamming in the late 80s, gave it up. AGIS networks, host to Sanford Wallace, went broke. You can't name a single major company that spams. The only people who spam are pyramid schemers, shady pseudo-pharmaceutical marketers, online pornoographers and internet casinos.

      Spam isn't effective, at least not for someone on the right side of the law - it generates too much ill will. Spam me, for instance, and I'll complain all the way to the top, making clear that I won't buy your product or service again.

      What spam does have going for it is lack of control by market forces. Conventional ads, tee vee, newspaper, billboard, etc, all get paid for by the advertiser up front, before the consumer makes a choice about buying the product. Those ads must be effective, and must not offend too many potential customers, or the advertiser won't recoup the ad costs, much less sell any product. The consumer who chooses to buy a conventionally advertised product does end up paying the cost of the ads, but only after seeing or hearing the ad.

      This isn't true of spammed ads: everyone who recevies a spamvertisement pays some amount for it (dial-up time, CPU cycles, disk space allocation, etc), whether a spammed ad convinces them to buy the product, or revolts them so much they'll never buy from the spammer again.

      The Invisible Hand of the marketplace only acts very lightly on spam - spamvertisements can be as lurid and grotesque as possible because of this. That's why we need laws against spamming - market forces don't apply.

      Spamming is theft, plain and simple, and spammers must be punished.

      • My face isn't the one in question. I have no idea whether or not spam is TRULY effective, because I don't have any first-hand experience. However, it may interest you that in the text of the Slashdot post itself lies this:

        DoubleClick is now branching out from the ad serving business into the SPAM business due to the fact that direct email marketing 'is one of the few forms of Internet advertising that is thriving.'

        Clearly, regardless of your intuition or otherwise, Doubleclick thinks that spam is more profitable than banner ads. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to remember that while YOU personally may not respond well to spam (or anyone you know, for that matter) geeks generally do not. In fact, geeks tend to get really overexcited about the issue (for example, claiming that it is theft "plain and simple") but most people couldn't care less, and even seem to be buying spammed products. All of your postulations are all well and good, but the only reason to advertise is to sell more products, spam has been around for a while and its presence is only growing, therefore spam must be an effective way of selling products. That is what is plain and simple.

        • Clearly, regardless of your intuition or otherwise, Doubleclick thinks that spam is more profitable than banner ads. ... but the only reason to advertise is to sell more products, spam has been around for a while and its presence is only growing, therefore spam must be an effective way of selling products. That is what is plain and simple.

          Oh, please; Are you seriously asking me to believe that any business, especially "natural viagra" spammers, pyramid schemers and an ad company like DoubleClick actually use some kind of analysis to decide what to do? You might as well ask me to believe that Pro Wrestling isn't rigged. It's pretty clear that DoubleClick's backed into a corner by the low rates that people will pay for crappy banner ads. DoubleClick is grasping at straws in the only business they know: lying to people.

          Besides the issue of businesses making decisions on minimal data, you should read what I wrote: spam may be around, but whether the amount of spam is growing or shrinking has little to do with selling products. Your intuition that a relationship exists between spam quantity and selling products is demonstrably weak. Read the article to which you respond.

      • Actually, I know people who DO spam, and it is VERY effetive for them. Actually, market forces DO apply. To get the point at which you can safely spam without being shut down by a provider, you have to spend a LOT of money to get tier 1 or 2 bandwidth, and a safe server. Any mom & pop shop that tries to spam is shut down sooner rather than later. But if you have the money to buy the right bandwidth in the right location, you still can make quite a bit of money spamming.
      • Spamazon is "a big company". I've gotten spam from Dell, MicroWarehouse, Spamazon, Excite, Microsoft, and RealNetworks.

        The key is that they're all scum.

        Spam is very *cost-effective* - but that's not very effective in absolute terms. As long as backbones are willing to look the other way as long as the bills are paid, spam will be a problem.
        • I get periodic email with special offers, information, even (GASP!) updates to privacy policies from a number of major online retailers. They are few and far between (1 or 2 per business per week). They only come from the ones with which I do business. They always come from the same email address. This is not spam. Hell, most of these companies will gladly provide you with information on how to remove yourself.

          Spam is an offer for a penis-enlargement pill from a randomly-generated Yahoo account. Spam is (as best I can tell) a Japanese porn site sample. Spam is a make-money-fast offer. Spam pulls tricks to hide the sender. Spam will send the same message to the same nonexistant address 50 times.

          Pick your battles. If you fight them all, you will not win (unles you're one of those blackholes-will-save-us-all-from-evil types, in which case have fun on your small isolated island of the internet).

          • What you're getting may not be spam. Other people I know get spammed by some of the big retailers. I probably got about twenty spams from MicroWarehouse before we threw them in the filters.

            All the stuff you're talking about adds to the annoyance, but it's not *necessary* for spam. For it to be spam, it has to be unsolicited, bulk, and email. That's it. If I didn't ask for it, and lots of people are getting it, it's spam.

            Sure, Amazon is glad to tell you how to remove yourself; at one point, it was to send mail to "no-special-offers-ever-3@amazon.com". But they don't always honor removes.

            They're in our spam filters because (and yes, I called and verified this with them) they have said they will *NEVER* ask for permission before sending their promotional mailings. You know that little "Send me special offers" checkbox most places have? They've said they won't have one, and that they'll spam until told to stop.

            There are lots of companies that ask first. I do business with them, and I lose only a few sites that, frankly, weren't doing anything for me to begin with.
      • Though I realize double click could care less if SPAM works or not, just as long as companies think it does and they pay double click.

        So essentially double click will spam up, while advertising to companies that their SPAM works.

        Personally I have NEVER received one single SPAM email that I had even a remote interest in.

        For instance, you sign up for a mortgage with a company, and get SPAMed for some 'investment opportunity.' What does the one have to do with the other?

        Not to mention phone spam, and fax spam. I get more phone spam than anything. They have ruined my phone totally. Ever day I gotta run downstairs to grab the phone and look that the number is 'out of area' before I Ignore it. They should pay for the energy I burn up and down the steps. My fax machine fires up, only to be some real estate spam. My postal mail box is always busting fresh with spam from the big chain super markets and credit card applications. My olfactory nerves are spammed as I drive by Steve's soulfoud, but that kinda works...As the final insult, my email is spammed.

        Watch out, there will be spam on the one dollar bill next...

    • Re:so! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by The G ( 7787 )
      Click banner ads etc. if you really hate spam, so that advertisers have a worthwhile alternative.

      I see absolutely no moral obligation to provide advertisers with a "worthwhile" alternative. They aren't entitled to my eyeballs.

      Perhaps I should also provide murderers with an alternative if I don't like being shot? Or provide con artists with an alternative if I don't like being cheated?

      The day advertisers start advertising products for their functionality, durability, and versatility, rather than sexy-lifestyle-fu and blinking lights, I'll consider advertising an honest endeavour.
      --G

    • Million dollar idea! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by swordboy ( 472941 )
      Someone should create software to automatically update the HOSTS file of the millions of PCs owned by users who hate this but do not know how to make it stop.

      This would undoubtedly cause Big Brother to take notice. I'm sure that they would gladly pay you off for a few hundred thousand.

      • Re:Million dollar idea! (Score:4, Funny)

        by curunir ( 98273 ) on Monday February 25, 2002 @05:03PM (#3066914) Homepage Journal
        Oooh...and for irony's sake, they could distribute it using DARTmail!

        Hi Friend,

        Do you hate SPAM. Are you sick of direct marketers sending you a seemingly endless stream of stupid offers? If so, click here [links to software program to update the hosts file].

        If you would prefer to be hung like a horse, see young, virgin, barely legal redheads or get a masters degree through the mail from a fully accreditted college, click here [links to a message explaining why responding to SPAM is bad]

    • Profits (Score:3, Interesting)

      by _Sprocket_ ( 42527 )


      Remember: complain about spam all you like, but the problem is that the spam is effective.

      Yes, yes. Sure. "Spam works." There are also other industries that turn a considerable profit too. Psychic teleservices [csicop.org] and technological snake oil [cnn.com] are two recent examples. They are both high-profit, highly visible / advertised... and under Federal investigation.

  • Call them and let them know how you feel. (Score:5, Informative)

    by kolding ( 55685 ) on Monday February 25, 2002 @04:04PM (#3066526)
    From Doubleclick's Website, the number to call for information about DARTMail is 866-459-7606 (toll free). Feel free to give them a call and give them a piece of your mind. Remember to be polite, you'll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. If enough people call to complain and ask to be kept off all of their lists, the following will happen. 1: They'll rethink their position, 2: they'll be forced to remove you, and 3: their phone lines will be clogged and they won't be able to make any sales.
    • > Remember to be polite, you'll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

      ...but "550 - fuck off, spammer" really gets their attention.

    • Remember to be polite, you'll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar

      I'm not really interested in catching flies, I am interested in smacking them dead. And I can find better uses for honey than to feed it to flies.

    • 1: They'll rethink their position,

      2: they'll be forced to remove you, and

      3: their phone lines will be clogged and they won't be able to make any sales.

      If only we could get the same number of people to call that number that attack every site that's published on here... Of course, the circuit would probably overload are a relatively small number of callers.

      I have a spam I need to send out:

      Hello friend!
      Do you respond to unsolicited emails?

      Do you expect to fight: baldness, lack of virility, debt, weight, lack of bust size, or nose hemorroids by responding to, and even paying totally unqualified, unregistered, unethical people? Well worry no more! Save time, by pulling several hundred dollars out of your bank account and giving it to the first homeless person you meet! You'll not only accomplish the same thing, but possibly end up doing some good for someone worse off than yourself!

      If you choose to ignore this missive and pursue unsolicited offers, just remember this, you're not only incredibly naive, but you're adding to a problem, which plagues others. May your computer suffer harddrive failure and rats eat the insulation from your phone line.

    • It's not spam; it's opt-in targetted email list product. Companies pay $100K+ for this hosted solution. The company gives DC a honkin' huge email list; DC sends out Acme branded email and handles things like bounces and unsubscriptions.
      • > It's not spam; it's opt-in targetted email list product. Companies pay $100K+ for this hosted solution. The company gives DC a honkin' huge email list; DC sends out Acme branded email and handles things like bounces and unsubscriptions.

        It's not spam, I paid good money for this list!

        (Hint: If you bought my email address and emailed it, I didn't opt in. Whether you bought it from a guy in a trailer park or a guy in a suit makes no difference. It's spam.)

        • You're missing the point - the company's list has to be opt-in. And DARTmail is way to expensive to be used as a spamming tool. Also, the list isn't given to DoubleClick per se - it still belongs to the client and DoubleClick can't touch it or use it. Lastly, DoubleClick doesn't send out the mailings either - they provide the asp technology. The client still manages the list and sends the mailings.
          • I'm afraid you're naive if you believe that, just as I once was.

            How does DoubleClick verify that the lists in use are opt-in? And what penalties will they enforce if they aren't? If a DoubleClick customer spams via the DARTmail service, DoubleClick has just as much responsibility as an ISP does when one of it's customers starts spamming. Moreso, in fact, since bulk email is the stated point of the DARTmailservice.

            As for the cost issues, there have been other companies who have charged (and continue to charge) a hefty price to act as an email marketing service provider. That didn't stop their customers from using it for spam.

            How do I know? Because I've worked for an email service provider, and have seen it happen. Given DoubleClick's spotty history, there's no reason to think it won't happen with DARTmail.

            • Re:Call them and let them know how you feel. (Score:5, Informative)

              by zama ( 244613 ) <bbcas.hotmail@com> on Monday February 25, 2002 @06:39PM (#3067488)
              Actually if you want to wave credentials you'll lose - as an ex-employee of DCLK, an ex-client, and currently a list admin using a different provider.

              So let's go:

              1. How does DoubleClick verify that the lists in use are opt-in?
              When you are negotiating for the process, at least one sales person and probably a pre-sales consultant goes to your site and goes through the registration process multiple times. Some of the addresses they then ask to unsubscribe - if you spam them anyway there's a problem. They also go through your privacy policy to ensure compliance.

              Also, if you send out a mailing that comes back with large numbers of unsubscribes and bounces, that raises a big red flag. Lastly, there actually are people monitoring the abuse@doubleclick.net address. If a particular client crops up enough, it will be addressed.

              2. What are the penalties if the list isn't opt-in?
              If it's proven that your list is not opt-in then your contract is abruptly cancelled. And depending on how bad a PR flap you can be sued.

              3. DoubleClick has no responsibility for spam like an ISP.
              DoubleClick's number one responsibility is to its shareholders. Bad PR has significantly hurt their business.

              4. Bulk email is the stated point of the DARTmail service.
              Nyet. You are misunderstanding "bulk" means large numbers. If you send out 1.8MM newsletters like I do, Outlook or some small scale provider isn't going to cut it. That's bulk. The stated purpose of DARTmail is bulk OPT-IN email.

              5. Cost issues.
              We left DARTmail because it was too expensive. Period. Most SPAM is only cost-effective with a cheap CPM. That's not a 100% guarantee but a general truism.

              I have no doubt that there will be abuses of the technology. DoubleClick's client base is large and there are certainly issues in monitoring compliance for that many clients. But there's a huge difference between a legitimate product that will be fractionally abused and actual spamware.

              • When you are negotiating for the process, at least one sales person and probably a pre-sales consultant goes to your site and goes through the registration process multiple times. Some of the addresses they then ask to unsubscribe - if you spam them anyway there's a problem. They also go through your privacy policy to ensure compliance.

                That's opt-out, not opt-in.

                Look, folks, no matter how much marketing drones would like to redefine it, the phrase "opt in" has a meaning in the English language. It means that the person took an affirmative step to get on the list and get the mail. It does not mean that they forgot to uncheck a button on a Web form somewhere, or that they signed up for something unrelated but were too apathetic (or too paranoid) to ask to be removed from the list when some huckster started bothering them.

                If the user has to take action to get off the list, then it's not opt-in. If there's a check box on a Web form somewhere, but the default value is "yes, send the mail", then that's not opt-in, either. For a list to be "opt-in", the user must actually request the mail. And that's not common.

                Capische?

        • Maybe you personally, but the in the collective case of the word I this is simply not true, huge numbers of people DO opt in and allow their addresses to be sold through affiliate programs and the like.
  • A good /.ing should show them how we feel about this, but for god sakes, remember to disable your cookies before you go there...

    • Re:Let's get 'em (Score:3, Informative)

      by Dimensio ( 311070 )
      Won't work for me. I route doubleclick.com and every domain associated therein to 127.0.0.1 (and I run a private webserver) on my box.

  • Junkbuster (Score:3, Informative)

    by joib ( 70841 ) on Monday February 25, 2002 @04:04PM (#3066528)
    Well, I'm happy to have filtered out everything doubleclick related with the help of junkbuster [junkbuster.com] for the last few years.

    • Re:Junkbuster (Score:2, Informative)

      by jsprat ( 442568 )
      Another way is to download this hosts [smartin-designs.com] file. About a 50K download = 10,080 unique servers blocked, 171 doubleclick servers. Last updated end of November, last year.
    • Smartin Designs [smartin-designs.com].

      The lameness filter won't let me paste the list in here and post but the hosts blocking list they have there is a good 400k long. I use it religiously.

      Here's a hint for the less informed: In windows9x/me edit the file \windows\hosts to allow you to redirect sites like doubleclick so they won't receive their web bug, cookie and other ad-tracker data. The text to insert can be found at the above site. For win2k/NT it's in \winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.

      In linux, the hosts file is in \etc\hosts.

      Go have fun ;-)

    • Re:Junkbuster (Score:4, Informative)

      by O2n ( 325189 ) on Monday February 25, 2002 @05:04PM (#3066921) Homepage
      The Ad-Zapper [zip.com.au] for squid [squid-cache.org] works also fine, and if you're what the slashdot users usually pretend to be, you should run squid, not junkbuster. ;)

      Also, for spam in general, or rather against it, SpamMotel [spammotel.com] and especially SneakEmail [sneakemail.com] work like a charm; SneakEmail even lets you reply to (suspected) spammers without revealing your real address.

      Of course, if you have your own domain/MX and mail server, you can generate these "one-time" email addresses yourself - but using sneakemail is just too easy and convenient.
  • First line of their privacy policy [doubleclick.com]:
    No personal information is used by DoubleClick to deliver Internet ads.

    So either their software doesn't include doubleclick customers, or the Privacy policy is wrong.

    Course, if they've got any lawyers, both are probably right.


    • Spam is an email ad, not an Internet ad. So, technically, spamming people who have viewed DoubleClick ads on web pages is OK per their privacy policy. Besides, it's their privacy policy, not yours. They can change it anytime they like.

      • Now this is just wrong! Just because the web makes up something like half the Internet, depending on how you measure it, does not mean that "Internet ads" == "web ads". Or would you also like to buy only http connectivity from your isp, no mail/news/p2p/...??? They may mean what you say, but spam IS a form of internet ads.
    • Actually DARTMail is used to deliver email to OPT-IN customers of email publications. The DARTMail functionality simply allows publishers to make sure the ads in that opt-in mail are targeted to the correct audience based on non-personal data like geographical region or domain name. This entire thread is based on a gross misinterpretation of what DARTMail does.
  • ... anyone see any mail from it yet? I want to know what new host to add to pipe directly to /dev/null.

    • Don't pipe to /dev/null
      I'm wondering if there's a method of rerouting incoming connections to port 25. Say if someone from a specific host tries to connect to port 25, your server acts as a transparent redirect, reconnecting them to their own mailserver so that they end up overloading themsleves.

      I'm probably not thinking that through all the way, but one of the best methods, IMO, of countering spam is with methods that cause the spammer's mailservers to crash in mid-run.
      • Spammer don't tend to run SMTP servers. They just blast out email without listening.

  • I hate to say it... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by bwindle2 ( 519558 )
    but hasn't this always been one of the biggest complaints about SPAM is that it is things you are uninterested in? I might not just blindly hit 'd' on everything that looks like spam if its actually things I'm semi-interested in...
    • No, not really.... My biggest complaint about spam mail is that it's totally unsolicited. Even when I get spam that might otherwise be of interest (EG. Buy one, get one free inkjet cartridges!), I trash it immediately because I don't want to contribute to a company that does business that way.

  • Good thing! (Score:5, Funny)

    by GodHead ( 101109 ) on Monday February 25, 2002 @04:07PM (#3066548) Homepage
    I for one am looking forward to the "Nu-Spam". Since I have a B.S. already, I'll get ads from only the finest in unaccredited masters degree programs. Also, just think of the targeted pr0n. No more brunettes thanks, only the red-headed barely-legal college girls will send me invitations to meet them and their roommates on-line...

  • I mean, what do you think they are collecting people's surfing habits information for, if not for spamming/selling later?

    It's not like DoubleClick is monitoring how many times per day people go to Monster or HotJobs job board, and how many resumes they have sent, to determine how desparate they are to find a job, and then alert the President to send them a bigger check in the mean time so that they can survive^H^H^H spend and contribute to the growth of the economy?

  • Specificially Targeted Porn (Score:3, Funny)

    by DeathPooky ( 559729 ) on Monday February 25, 2002 @04:07PM (#3066554)
    Well, at least now if I recieve 50 porn emails, those emails will be specifically targeted to my porn needs, ensuring that I'll be able to find the porn I want faster and with greater reliability. When a company that destroys your privacy has your best interests in mind it really warms your heart.

  • this looks like an acquired product (Score:5, Informative)

    by hymie3 ( 187934 ) on Monday February 25, 2002 @04:08PM (#3066556)
    DoubleClick recently acquired [doubleclick.com] MessageMedia [messagemedia.com], a double-opt-in email marketing company. In addition to MessageMedia's customer base, DoubleClick picked up their mailing list software. MessageMedia hosted email solutions for large companies; "Get Your Diploma Online" spammers wouldn't be able to afford them. Looks like DARTMail is just DoubleClick's branding of the MessageMedia product.

  • DoubleClick (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dr. Sp0ng ( 24354 ) <mspong.gmail@com> on Monday February 25, 2002 @04:08PM (#3066558) Homepage
    If Slashdot's "official party line" is that we're against DoubleClick and their crap, why is it that Slashdot runs DoubleClick ads?

  • according to WHOM? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Em Emalb ( 452530 ) <ememalb.gmail@com> on Monday February 25, 2002 @04:09PM (#3066564) Homepage Journal
    "E-mail advertising, which is relatively inexpensive, is one of the few forms of Internet advertising that is thriving..."

    According to whom?

    Every single person I know complains about spam. Every single one of them deletes without reading the crap. Almost every one of them uses some sort of filtering/blocking.

    And no, these aren't all geek-centric folks. Hotmail, yahoo, etc., all have basic filtering in place. Some UCE gets through, but most get filtered to their spam box.

    Where the hell are these numbers coming from?

    I realize that 1% of 10000 emails sent out is an acceptable return rate, but I wouldn't call it thriving. Show some solid proof that this is true and I will believe you.

    Are people out there really this gullible? For pete sake, if I purchased all the products or services offered in spam, I'd be one highly educated, rich, successful, hung to my knee, always hard, in great shape, sexual tyrannosaurus.

    And we know that ain't gonna happen.

    • Re:according to WHOM? (Score:3, Informative)

      by hymie3 ( 187934 )
      This is not "spam", per-se. This product is primarily a hosted solution. Think $100K+. This is for big companies who don't really feel like managing their own lists. When you put down your email address on a catalog or credit card form, the email you start receiving (technically opt-in) will probably be sent using this product.
    • For pete sake, if I purchased all the products or services offered in spam, I'd be one highly educated, rich, successful, hung to my knee, always hard, in great shape, sexual tyrannosaurus.

      Well, if you'd really be one of those... why haven't you purchased the products yet? Or are you already a highly educated, rich, successful, hung to my knee, always hard, in great shape, sexual tyrannosaurus?
    • There is a clear difference between what most people refer to as "spam" and double opt-in email marketing. The latter means that you actually entereted your email address on some website requesting information and/or email "deals". Then they emailed you and you had to either reply-to or click on some link in the email to confirm your subscription. This isn't the "Get your university diploma" crap that eveyone complains about and then deletes without reading.

      Now I don't know about you, but there are actual online copanies that I don't mind getting emails from. Amazon is one of them. I like to know about upcoming DVD releases and if Amazon emails me about them, I will sometimes read them. How many of you are also signed up to receive American Airlines SuperSaver fares or something similar? This is the type of direct marketing email that we are talking about here.

      So when someone is truly interested in a company's products enough to signup for and confirm interest in receiving emails, there is a good chance that at some point that person will buy something based on one of the emails.

      I used to work for a company that was one of the first companies to make money using direct marketing email. We were a public company (in the dot-com craze, that is) and the direct marketing email part of the company made double what the online banner advertisements made. It was well into the millions of dollars per quarter range. Now that isn't a ton of many, but it was respectable for the number of people it required to run the company and the very lost cost of sending the emails.

    • Several people have pointed out "If I send out one million emails, and have only a .001% response rate, it still was effective." HOWEVER, anybody who has ever worked in any position dealing with the public should realize that if you have 999,900 pissed off people, a small percentage of them are going to be wackos who will do anything to take you down. I guarantee that one pissed-off customer, if motivated enough, can do more than enough harm to counteract 100 good customers.

      However, I still think the Spam business is thriving, for the sellers of Spam tools and lists. The fact that everyone gets Spam makes these tools and lists look effective. People think, "I get a lot of Spam and must be effective," purchase and use the tools, and spread the "Spam is thriving" meme some more. In fact, I wouldn't put it past the Spam folks to try to spread the meme even more, and hire a few poor chumps to post to every forum possible that "Spam works." (Play "Spot the plant on Slashdot" with me...)

      Find me a company that made money off of Spam, and I'll show you a company that sells tools and lists.

    • Re:according to WHOM? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by njdj ( 458173 )
      I realize that 1% of 10000 emails sent out is an acceptable return rate, but I wouldn't call it thriving.

      Actually 1% is many times higher than the response rate a spammer needs. A response rate of one hundredth of 1%, i.e. one response out of 10000 recipients, is enough. Do the math. you send 20,000,000 emails at tiny cost (to you), and if you make $50 profit out of each person who responds and one person in 10,000 responds, you've just made 2,000 times $50 which is $100,000. Do it once a month and you're pulling in a million per year. That's why there's a lot of spam - because it's extremely profitable.
      The fact that your spamming makes more than 99.9% of the people who receive it very angry, is completely irrelevant if all you're interested in is making money.
  • 127.0.0.1 localhost.nmsu.edu localhost doubleclick.net

  • Speculation (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25, 2002 @04:09PM (#3066572)
    Now I'm not one to avoid being a rabid alarmist, but the article really doesn't say anything that suggests Doubleclick is making data it has collected available to Spammers. The statement "helping advertisers segment their customer data to launch more targeted ads" suggests that they are making the technology available for these people to process their own data.


    Maybe that's no better and I could be wrong but there's nothing in the article to suggest that they are selling actual personal data of any kind as part of this deal.

  • Read the article! It's for customers (Score:4, Insightful)

    by quistas ( 137309 ) <robomilhous@hotmail.com> on Monday February 25, 2002 @04:10PM (#3066580)
    Wow, 22 comments and no one read the article. It talks about how it's designed to help segment your customers -- while this probably has evil applications, the releases DC is sending out seem to be targeted to, say, Amazon-type companies that want to send emails to their own customer base.

    -- q
    • Fear of being spammed by a company is the quickest way to scare away new first time buyers I can possibly think of. This is cost effective how? My online shopping has been about zero because of protecting my e-mail. I want it open for friends and family to keep in touch, not a cesspool that gets bulk emptied once a week.

  • So...? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Archanagor ( 303653 )
    Since Doubleclick is now turned 'spammer' Does this mean that their entire subnet will be blacklisted from the net? :) I suppose, when I start getting spam from them, I can just e-mail their upstream provider (probably UU.NET) and have them pull the plug. No more spyware banners, no more junkmail, and all is well in the world! :)

    Personally, I think this is an excellent move! WTG DoubleClick, spam yourselves into oblivion, please!
  • Does this mean I'll get a ton of ads for Visual Studio XP, since I keep seeing their banners on OSDN?
  • E-mail advertising, which is relatively inexpensive, is one of the few forms of Internet advertising that is thriving, and has become a key area of focus at DoubleClick.

    I love the spin they put on this. They make spam out to sound like the latest & greatest form of advertising.
    It's SPAM. Not advertising, SPAM. Just because it is "thriving" does not give them the right to spam us.

    In addition to helping advertisers segment their customer data to launch more targeted ads, DartMail 3.5 also helps track customer transactions in more detail, recording such information as the value of a given purchase and whether it was made in direct response to an e-mail transaction.

    Invasion of Privacy becomes "Track Customer Transactions in Detail". Amazing.

    After all, that's JUST what we want...for people to be able to track us even more. When did invading our privacy become a good thing??

    The internet is NOT Television, and these marketers need to stop trying to treat it like that. They can NOT force us to look at ads, no matter what they do. And dumping unsolicited emails on us isn't the solution.

    Until these guys get it, I suggest 2 things:
    1) Block doubleclick (wildcarded, of course) on your router/firewall.
    2) Make use of SpamCop.net [spamcop.net].
    • It's SPAM. Not advertising, SPAM. Just because it is "thriving" does not give them the right to spam us.

      It certainly does seem to give you and the rest of the slashdoterati the right to jump to wild and hysterical conclusions though. Doubleclick acquired MessageMedia. MessageMedia makes mailing list software with html mail click-through tracking abilities (same way those email valentines cards do) so they can tell who was interested in the mailings. Their main business is in doing systems integration, to massage the marketing data from various databases into mailing list categories. Sounds like a lot more work than address harvesting for spam, don't it?

      But it's easier to jump on the scapegoat, isn't it? They should have to prove their innocence and justify whatever they do isn't wrong, because it's just too darn hard to find facts, isn't it?

  • Good! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by mcjulio ( 68237 )
    Doubleclick, to be in the business, will have to abide by the spam laws that states have already passed. This means Doubleclick will be one of the few groups I get spam from that actually add the ADV: prefix, which makes filtering them braindead easy.

  • Doubleclick's press release (Score:4, Informative)

    by quistas ( 137309 ) <robomilhous@hotmail.com> on Monday February 25, 2002 @04:16PM (#3066620)
    Is here [doubleclick.com].

    It doesn't appear to be spam-tastic at all -- they talk through the whole thing about newsletters/customer bases/permission-based marketing.


    You guys really want to go after a spam tool provider, go nuke Earth Online, or any of the guys who produce stealth emailers.


    -- q

  • Simple Solution using DNS (Score:3, Interesting)

    by swordboy ( 472941 ) on Monday February 25, 2002 @04:18PM (#3066632) Journal
    Change your hosts file to block doubleclick and everything else:

    Here's a good list [csuchico.edu].

    Cheers!
    • Careful, thats a Macintosh-format hosts file. Make sure you do this to make it work on Unix and Windows:

      lynx -dump 'http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~atman/spam/Hosts.sh tml' | awk '{ print $3"\t"$1 }' > new.file
      Then copy or append new.file to your /etc/hosts.

  • OK, tell me, is *anyone* is surprised by this? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by syzxys ( 557810 ) on Monday February 25, 2002 @04:23PM (#3066651)

    Does this really surprise anybody? Doubleclick has been a bunch of capricious, dishonest bastards for as long as I can remember. They were one of the first names associated with evil cookie tracking practices(tm) all the way back in 1995 (and even earlier?), IIRC.

    direct email marketing "is one of the few forms of Internet advertising that is thriving"

    As someone pointed out above, I wonder what they mean by "thriving." A 0.1% response rate is not particularly "thriving" -- I think it's more because there is no way to punish them for spamming.

    Wasn't there some kind of paper published recently that showed that, in one of those game-theoretical situations with two equilibrium strategies (everyone cooperating, or everyone backstabbing each other -- I think it's called the "prisoner's dilemma"), people tended to pick a cooperative strategy if the group was allowed to punish backstabbers? Because IMO, the situation with spamming is very much like the prisoner's dilemma.

    I did an experiment one time, I blocked doubleclick and a bunch of other ad sites at my firewall. The problem was, there were so many sites it was like trying to stop a firehose with a bathtub stopper. There have been efforts like the RBL, but they always seem to start charging money. IMHO, this is not just because they are "greedy," it's because their operational costs are too high. And why? Because there are too many spammers. I think the only way to really fight spam is with a distributed solution. Here we'd run into all the network poisoning problems people worried about with gnutella et al. in the early days. Is anyone working on anything like this? Is anyone even talking about it?

    It seems like we're getting spammed with spam stories nowadays, not just from slashdot but on zdnet and others as well. Is spam getting worse, or is the spam lobby getting more aggressive, or what? :-)

    Just my $0.01

    ---
    Windows 2000/XP stable? safe? secure? 5 lines of simple C code say otherwise! [zappadoodle.com]
  • I dunno, but perhaps it is time to just start banning IP [subnets] completely. I'd hate to sound like some egalitarian asshole, but with the exception of a few friends, I wouldn't miss anything coming from the IP addies owned by ATT, and sure as hell not miss any of the excrement that is AOL.
    Stuff like doubleclick I wouldn't miss either . . .
  • I'm a little biased because I work for a company that sends promotional email blasts.

    That having been said, there is a huge difference between spam and the mail this service is sending.

    Like it or not, at one time or another you didn't read a privacy notice and your email address was sold to another company.

    When we send out 5 million+ mailings, about 2000 TOS (terms of service) or Spamcop violations will come back. What most of these morons don't realize is, there's both a link and an email address they can send mail to to unsubscribe permanently and effectively from our lists.

    This won't get you off other peoples' lists, but it will get you off ours. Currently, about a 1/4 of our customers actually have a timestamp and IP address telling us exactly when and where these addresses came from. I would expect in the near future that everybody will start doing this.

    Now, this isn't so say that all people are nice. That's not to say that people don't troll web pages and people don't fake mail-from headers. It happens. But there's also a lot of promotional mail that YOU OPTED INTO whether you realize it or not.

    What I'm saying is, before labeling every piece of mail that you get as spam, try unsubscribing. And yes, I know that some unsubscribe links are fake. What are you going to do? There are also fake breasts and fake watches. Will you spend the rest of your life wandering around as a confused virgin? (well.. maybe the wrong place to ask this)

    So, in conclusion, I know how fashionable it is to love linux and hate companies that are "out to get us" like Microsoft and DoubleClick, but this article is inflammatory and causing a lot of stupid people to post a lot of stupid comments.

    If you want to get out some angst, try:

    http://www.postmastergeneral.com/

    http://www.e-centives.com/corp/

    http://www.messagemedia

    Or, combining microsoft AND email:

    http://www.bcentral.com/

    And lots of other companies (like mine) that send lots of LEGAL, NON-SPAM, promotional email.
    • If you can, could you tell us what proportion of an email "blast" actually clicks the unsubscribe link?

      The general perception these days is that nobody should ever click an unsubscribe link, because it will prove your email address works. It's nice to find someone who might be able to provide some real facts about this.
    • Plainly:

      You have NOT opted in until you've confirmed your subscription via some unique generated URL or reply-to address. There's just no other practical way you can be sure your list only contains those that chose to opt-in.

      If you're afraid to use confirmed opt-in, perhaps it is because you know most people aren't interested in the spam you already send out. Who knows though.

      Postmastergeneral [google.com] on groups.google.com shows many, many hits regarding their spam.

    • I know that some unsubscribe links are fake. What are you going to do? There are also fake breasts and fake watches.
      That's not a fair comparison at all.

      Hitting a fake unsubscribe link has the potential effect of making sure you get a lot more SPAM when my address gets promoted from the '60 Million Email Addresses' list to the '3 Million KNOWN GOOD Email Addresses' list. As a consequence, I'm not going to ever click on an opt-out link that came unsolicited - too risky.

      Hitting a fake breast would result in a slap to the face - and would be worth it!

    • Re:Do you know what spam is? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Monday February 25, 2002 @05:37PM (#3067146)
      > Now, this isn't so say that all people are nice. That's not to say that people don't troll web pages and people don't fake mail-from headers. It happens. But there's also a lot of promotional mail that YOU OPTED INTO whether you realize it or not.

      Bullshit.

      If I opted into it, and didn't realize I'd done so (perhaps I'm the dr00ling AOLer you seem to think I am), then show me the opt-in.

      That's what "double opt-in" (or more accurately, "confirmed opt-in", the "double" is your industry's language, trying to make it sound unreasonable) is for. Until you can demonstrate to my satisfaction that I opted in, it's spam.

      >What I'm saying is, before labeling every piece of mail that you get as spam, try unsubscribing. And yes, I know that some unsubscribe links are fake. What are you going to do? There are also fake breasts and fake watches.

      So, because some tits are fake and some Rolexes are fake, and since I wouldn't give up feeling tits, or wearing a Rolex, just because I can't trust the owner of the tits or the seller of the Rolex, I should trust you? Holy non-sequitur, Batman!

      The overwhelming majority of the claims of "click here to be removed" are lies. The overwhelming majority of the "You opted in" claims are lies.

      So what I'm not gonna do is this: I sure as fsck ain't gonna trust your unsubscribe link, that's what.

      And what I am gonna do is this: Find your upstream, and report you to them as a spammer. Don't want the 2000 TOS violation reports? Don't spam.

      And if your upstream ignores those reports, what am I gonna do? Well, I'm probably gonna add your netblocks to my private blocklist. Don't want to be blocked? Don't spam.

      > And lots of other companies (like mine) that send lots of LEGAL, NON-SPAM, promotional email.

      How come (and I don't mean you specifically, I mean the general case over the past few years) every spammer always tries to re-define "spam" in such a way as "Well, whatever we do isn't spam."

      If it's in my mailbox, it's unsolicited, and it was generated in bulk, it's spam, and I'll choose to either block the server that sent it, or report it to the sender's provider. What are you going to do?

  • About a year and a half ago, DoubleClick announced [digitrends.net] that they had acquired NetCreations [netcreations.com], a mailing list company run by an old friend of mine Rosalind Resnick, for a rediculously large number of millions of dollars. NetCreations had been in the business of running opt-in mailing lists. This didn't seem to attract a lot of interest at the time.

    The deal fell apart [list-news.com] after DoubleClick's stock price tanked, and NetCreations sold themselves instead to Seat Pagine Gaille.

    So, they've tried this before, and it failed to gel. Let's hope that it fails again. The threat of targeted spam is far greater, I believe, than mass-mailed spam, because it's much more difficult to filter out.

    thad
  • I've been blocking all mail from them for going on 2 years now. I also quarentine all mail with "doubleclick.net" in the body. Works like a champ.

  • DARTMail Targeting (Score:5, Informative)

    by lord13 ( 39188 ) on Monday February 25, 2002 @04:40PM (#3066740) Homepage

    I am a bit familiar with DARTMail (actually used the product), and from what I know, it does not use the vast amount of information that DoubleClick has for it's targeting - instead you upload all of your site's registration data, and target based off of that. It allows you to put together different emails for different groups of people, assembling HTML emails like building blocks.


    The real murky area (I felt) is that what they do with the information once they have it... Do they integrate it in with their master list, getting even more info? I was assured that would never happen - that all of the info uploaded would be segregated, but I never read (or had access to) any of the fine print.

    • The info on the DartMail page says that it's opt-in. My question is: Is it confirmed opt-in? (i.e. does it send out a request for confirmation email, and only if there's a reply, it subscribes you.) Otherwise it would be easy for someone to fake an add request.

  • Cool! (Score:3, Funny)

    by supabeast! ( 84658 ) on Monday February 25, 2002 @04:44PM (#3066757)
    Now DoubleClick and all related networks can end up on the various blackhole lists, so we can start seeing their advertisements and cookies disappear! Rock on!

  • ARIN Info (Score:2, Informative)

    by JumboMessiah ( 316083 )
    Looks like I'll be adding this to my access table. Information from ARIN on doubleclick and MessageMedia's netblocks.

    • www.doubleclick.com

    GENUITY (NET-GNTY-199-92) GNTY-199-92
    199.92.0.0 - 199.95.255.255
    Double Click, Inc. (NETBLK-DOUBLECLICK3) DOUBLECLICK3
    199.95.206.0 - 199.95.209.255

    • www.messagemedia.com

    Cable & Wireless USA (NETBLK-CW-10BLK) CW-10BLK
    208.128.0.0 - 208.175.255.255
    Inflow (NETBLK-CW-208-169-16A) CW-208-169-16A
    208.169.16.0 - 208.169.23.255
    MessageMedia (NETBLK-NETBLK-INFLOW-MMEDIA) NETBLK-INFLOW-MMEDIA
    208.169.22.0 - 208.169.23.255

  • Here's a profile that we can build (Score:3, Funny)

    by cecil36 ( 104730 ) on Monday February 25, 2002 @04:54PM (#3066833) Homepage
    To tie into the previous stories, how about creating a profile that includes the following people.

    Are unemployed
    Use the Internet
    Claim to own their own business
    Spent time in a dungeon in Europe for sending unsolicited e-mail
    Discovered that technology has reduced the response rate to their mass mailings to near 0%

    We take this profile and tell DoubleClick to mail every piece of spam to people who match all of these criteria. If all goes correctly, the number of addresses to be hit is one, and that lucky person is Bernard Shifman.
  • ...I'll continue to have an inbox filled with pr0n spam. How is that news?

    Hopefully, it will all come from the same domain or sender so it's easily filtered.

  • Doubleclick IP blocks (Score:3, Informative)

    by ahodgson ( 74077 ) on Monday February 25, 2002 @05:03PM (#3066917)
    For your firewalls
    -------------------

    204.176.152.248/21
    206.65.181.96/22
    206.65.181 .104/21
    63.85.84.0/24
    204.176.177.0/24
    208.211. 225.0/24
    208.203.243.0/24
    204.178.112.160/19
    20 4.253.104.0/23
    216.230.65.64/28
    63.77.79.192/27
    192.65.80.0/24
    128.11.60.64/27
    128.11.92.0/24
    199.95.210.0/24
    199.95.206.0/22

  • Since when is opt-in email marketing spam? (Score:3, Funny)

    by VPN3000 ( 561717 ) on Monday February 25, 2002 @05:15PM (#3066994)
    Dearest Timothy & Slashdot crew, Can we make an effort to get your terminology up to speed? I find it troubling that you guys tend to try and get us all worked up by using misleading phrases in the headlines. SPAM = unsolicited email The service these guys are offering is solicited when users download software, fill out magazine subscriptions, etc. I don't see where this is spam. Is all email businesses send to obtain clients considered spam by slashdot? I hope not. I would hope we were a bit more educated than that.
    To my fellow readers, please don't fall for Timothy's silly attempt at enraging you. Go ahead and mod me down, but I just disagree with misleading posts. They do nobody any good and a company's image some harm, and for no good reason. Victor
  • Internet Explorer 6 will block cookies from referenced sites, such as DoubleClick. These guys had better act fast if they're after the profiles on that Windows user base, because what they've got is all they'll ever have...
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • take a deep breath... (Score:3, Informative)

    by zama ( 244613 ) <bbcas.hotmail@com> on Monday February 25, 2002 @05:44PM (#3067208)
    Well, a couple people have pointed out that DARTmail is NOT a spammer product. But those people are in the minority so I'm going to drive this home:

    It's a premium email delivery engine. It is much too expensive for spammers. This is for publishers who maintain newsletters and house advertising lists. Hell, it's too expensive for a lot of publishers for that matter... Anywho, DoubleClick, like most email providers, is extremely uptight about their clients using opt-in only lists (albeit IIRC I think they still let you get away with pre-checked single opt-in). I know this personally from having them investigate mailings that had high rates of bounces and unsubscribes (it was a list import problem and the primary key wasn't properly parsed from the email address - I'm not a spammer!).

    Plus, there is nothing new about this - if you read the article, you see that it says this is DARTmail 3.5. DoubleClick has been in the email tech biz for a couple years now. v1 was scratch built, v2 was when they bought Flo, v3 is integrating Message Media's technology.

  • New Circle of Hell Established - film at 11 (Score:3, Funny)

    by jpellino ( 202698 ) on Monday February 25, 2002 @06:21PM (#3067402)
    Hades - February 25, 2002 (AP) - Dante Alighieri returned from the dead today to appear at a press conference announcing a new Circle of Hell component to accommodate Internet Spam providers. The new Circle, 8.5, will house spammers and marketers who have been deluging internet users with allegedly helpful emails, up to hundreds per day. "We thought long and hard about simply tossing them into Bolgia 9 or Bolgia 10," Alighieri said, "they are certainly Sowers of Discord and Inpersonators, but they also have elements of Alchemists - trying to turn base electrons into gold. For these reasons, it was simpler to give them their own new Circle - 8.5, than to try and winnow out the separate elements." Alighieri's assistants at eDante Enterprises reiterated the choice - saying "We were going to implement a system of distribution into the existing Circles, based on the contents of the message headers, but we feel they deserve their own place - right near the edge of the pit. Plus, have you seen some of these headers?" The existing denizens of adjoining Bolgias have 90 days to file protests, which eDante representatives say are already coming in fast and furious. "The most common complaint has been 'eeeeew - spammers?!' and that's mostly from the Evil Counselors in Circle 8 and Traitors in Circle 9." Doubleclick, and Cantor and Siegel were unavailable for comment.

  • Tim et al owe Doubleclick an apology (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hatless ( 8275 ) on Monday February 25, 2002 @09:33PM (#3068297)
    Before Doubleclick sues Slashdot for libel, it might be a good idea to post a correction to the story: that Dartmail is Doubleclick's hosted list-management service for companies and organizations to use to send targeted e-mail and newsletters to their customers and to people who have opted in. Doubleclick has done some ethically questionable things in their ad-serving business with respect to privacy, but their hosted broadcast-email services have always been strictly opt-in by contract, and they don't look kindly on customers who try to break that rule.

    Spammers don't really need what Dartmail offers. Spammers are working in high volume with low conversion rates and don't pay attention to removal requests. Dartmail is for organizations that want to target messages by the kind of detailed customer profile information (zip code, age, income, favorite color, products owned, shoe size, etc.) that spammers don't have, and want detailed reporting tying back to all of this, along with rock-solid, hassle-free subscribe/unsubscribe services to keep customers happy. This service is billed at something like $0.02 USD per message, which is more than spammers pay per message by several orders of magnitiude.

    Tim, Rob, and the rest: do you guys read the stories that posters submit links to? Do you understand them?

  • Why Assume Spam? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by crucini ( 98210 ) on Tuesday February 26, 2002 @12:23AM (#3068865)
    Doubleclick seems to be offering a hosted system for large scale emailing. This is not necessarily spam. Spam is UBE/UCE - note the U for unsolicited. The mere act of sending mail to a list is not spam. A few indicators that this is not aimed at spammers:
    1. Doubleclick boasts of their ability to dynamically insert text ads into text email messages. They claim that their competitors cannot do this yet. A spammer would have no interest in this feature because a spam message is ALL ad. Doubleclick is clearly operating on the premise that subscribed email newsletter is 'valuable real estate' because the user WANTS to read it. Therefore it makes economic sense to sell ads in that newsletter.
    2. Nobody can afford to publicly admit spam support. If Doubleclick is credibly tied to spam, their IP blocks will end up in blacklists, and pressure will mount upon their provider to eject them. If real corporations could make money spamming, they would all be doing it.

    Doubleclick is not the first or only company offering hosted outbound email services. There are many subscription newsletters which recipients are happy to receive, and the people responsible for them don't always have the time or skills to properly support them. Therefore there are companies that specialize in this.

    I also saw no mention in Doubleclick's announcement of any plans to utilize pre-existing data from click tracking or any other source. Rather, I saw them offer to let the list owner send targetted mailings or ads to some of his subscribers based on their "profiles". In other words, like much business software, this is kind of a programming language for non-programmers. It will presumably let the list owner say "If income > 60k then insert lexus add; else insert toyota add" where income comes from the signup form by which the user requested the subscription.

    Will spam be sent through this system? Certainly, if Doubleclick allows users to import pre-existing lists. The question is whether Doubleclick will be adequately responsive to spam complaints. If they decide to ignore spam complaints, their IP's will be blacklisted. If Doubleclick terminates a customer under this program, the impact to the customer will be greater than the impact to a typical spammer terminated by his ISP. The spammer just needs to find another source of IP connectivity. But the Doubleclick customer will typically be dependent on the Doubleclick infrastructure. I don't expect this to be a significant source of spam.

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