The Great Spam Truce: An Interview With Jim Nitchals

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April 16, 1998 (12:00 AM EDT)

The Great Spam Truce: An Interview With Jim Nitchals

By John Borland,

Jim Nitchals, a San Jose, Calif.-based programmer and science fiction writer, has become the closest thing to a leader that the anarchic anti-spam community has.

It is not a role he asked for -- or one that he particularly relishes.

Last week, he took the lead in negotiating with the community's arch-enemies, bulk e-mailers Sanford Wallace and Quantum Communications' Walt Rines, and found himself in the center of a flame war, pro and con, over his efforts. He says it was a "can of worms I wish I had never opened."

Still, he achieved the impossible. After protracted conference calls and e-mail debates, Wallace and Rines agreed to endorse the most restrictive anti-spam bill pending in Congress, a piece of legislation by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) that would allow consumers to sue advertisers for $500 per piece of mail they had not agreed to accept.

In return, Nitchals and a core of other anti-spammers agreed to support the business model of Rines and Wallace's planned venture, a backbone ISP that would pay other ISPs to get their permission to receive e-mail advertisements. This "opt-in" model is what many of Nitchals' allies had been advocating for some time, he said.

Several days later, Wallace announced that he would withdraw from the "spambone" venture with Rines, saying he was "too tired" to continue online in the face of opposition. A string of spam and junk-fax lawsuits against him had contributed to his retreat. But he said he would hold to the agreement with Nitchals and the other anti-spammers, and continue his support for Smith's bill.

The process has taken its toll on Nitchals, too. The arguments that arose over his "truce" proposal unearthed bitter fault lines in the net.admin.net-abuse.email newsgroup. Nitchals himself was the target of flames and accolades. That storm is only now beginning to fade.

Net Insider spoke with Nitchals about the Great Spam Truce, the maturing of the anti-spam community, and his own inadvertent place in the "spamlight."

You've been embroiled in a fairly contentious struggle between Sanford Wallace, other spammers, and your own anti-spamming community. How did that start?

It started because I had concerns over the content of a personal Web page that Sanford Wallace had put up, even though it was in the process of being disconnected when I made the calls. I spoke with Jason Rines, Walt's brother, when I made the calls, who answered the phone at Quantum, and he actually sounded reasonable, which was a big surprise to me. By the time we were done talking, I found we had a lot more in common, a lot more common ground than I ever expected.

This led to actual negotiations with Sanford Wallace and Walt Rines?

Right. Jason said, 'You've got to talk to Walt,' and literally by the next morning I was on a conference call with him and Sanford.

What was the reaction from the broad community?

To all of the people I brought up [the proposal] with, the reaction was unanimous. In private.

And online?

Once the story broke and it went online, there were people who started to question the idea just because it was Sanford pitching it. That was a bit of a disappointment for me, but very understandable. There's a lot of anger and it's very justified.

One of the surprising things online was the degree of cordiality between Sanford and yourself, and some of the others when Sanford finally got online and apologized and said he was withdrawing. There were certainly a fair amount of flames ....

He's done his share of flaming too. But he has residual hostility of his own that is also deserved. Not all of us have been friendly about this.

But the end seemed to be friendly for at least some of you. Or if not friendly, then at least cordial.

For most of us. It's the ones who aren't cordial about it. You know, for every ten people who are kind toward me, it barely heals the wounds from the one who is vile and nasty.

You've indicated that this isn't really a community with leaders.

No, it's not.

You essentially took this on yourself.

I stumbled into it. I was calling about an entirely unrelated issue.

You've said this has exposed fractures in the community that you weren't aware of before. Are these starting to heal?

They are already healing. For example, we've identified some concerns that most of our community share about CAUCE's [Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail] effectiveness and some of its policies. CAUCE is now listening and they realize that there perhaps are some changes that would be valuable to them.

And if another organization appears to lobby or become involved in legislative activities, it will work alongside CAUCE rather than against it or in competition with it. I think that's a sign of healing already.

Do you expect another organization to arise out of this debate?

That coin's been flipped and we don't know what side of the coin it's going to land on. We're trying our hardest to work within CAUCE first. We've brought up specific issues we feel are essential to be addressed either by CAUCE or a parallel organization that will work with them. And we're comfortable with that.

I see the healing as nearly complete already. The flame level is pretty low today.

Where do you go from here, now that you've essentially formed a truce with a pair of the Net's most notorious bulk mailers?

I think I'm becoming tired. But I know there's other people willing to fight the better fight at this point. My strategy is changing. It's more focusing on getting the Smith bill passed than on fighting individual spammers. Because for every one we whack, there's another mole that will pop up out of a different hole. That can go on forever, and it's time for that to stop.