File this one under When Good Things Happen To Bad People:
SLIDELL, La. — He’s a 30-year-old self-taught computer programmer and electronics repairman with a fondness for Scooby-Doo, cars and camping.
He’s also one of the country’s better-known spammers, one of the people critics say are responsible for the deluge of unwanted e-mail flooding the Internet.
Spam has been good to Ronnie Scelson of Slidell. An eighth-grade dropout who used to live in a mobile home, he now drives a sleek late-model Corvette and lives with his family in a five-bedroom home, complete with an in-ground pool and a game room.
Like most spammers, he doesn’t understand why people hate him.
“What I do is not illegal. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s a form of advertising — the only form that is totally environmentally safe. You push one button and it’s gone.”
It’s also the only form of advertising that imposes most of its costs on other people. He’s quoted in the article later saying that he sends out 560 million emails a week. Someone’s paying for all that bandwidth and server space, but it’s not Ronnie Scelson.
But maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh on him. After all, he does have some standards:
Scelson said unscrupulous mailers — “the ones who spam porn, chain letters, get-rich-quick schemes, multilevel marketing” — have given bulk e-mailers a bad name.
“I don’t believe in that,” he said. “I don’t find anything wrong with it, but I have a certain guideline for what I send.”
He said he honors requests to be removed from his mailing lists, which he said contain millions of e-mail addresses.
He also denies hiding his identity behind forged return addresses and says he doesn’t bounce e-mail through foreign relays. But he admits he once did both.
He says he now discloses his company name, phone number and address on his bulk e-mail and sends it only through his own equipment, including a bank of floor-to-ceiling mail servers in a back room of his shop.
“If you’re going to do this, use all your own equipment. Plus, you can do it faster, better,” he said.
“If you do it the right way, it’s more profitable. But at the same time, if you do it the way everybody wants you to, they’ll shut you down quicker.”
My heart is bleeding for you, Ronnie.
