I’m feeling sympathy for a spammer.

I know. It’s crazy. You hate spam. I hate spam. Everybody hates spam. Except for people who send it.

Take Michael Luckman. He’s a salesman. It’s not what he does. It’s who he is. For 40 years, the San Jose man has been in sales, marketing and product development.

“It’s in my blood,” he says.

He thinks of himself as a proud professional and he sees his regular e-mail blasts as an innovative way to land prospects. That’s not, however, the way the Spamhaus Project, an obscure but powerful international e-mail watchdog, sees it. The volunteer group has declared Luckman a spammer. As a result, his e-mail and website have been shut down.

“I’m dead in the water,” says Luckman, CEO of San Jose-based Achievex.

Luckman is so much a salesman that what he sells these days is training that teaches others how to sell. It’s hard to imagine he’d end up doing anything else.

Luckman’s great-grandmother was a Russian immigrant who bought and sold used furniture from a horse-drawn cart on the streets of Chicago. (Think of it as an early eBay.) His grandfather was a salesman. And now here’s Luckman, 64, who is passing what he knows about the sales game to others — for a price.

Marketing strategy

Luckman knows every sales person needs an edge, especially today with customers comparison-shopping on the Internet and with competition as fierce as ever. So besides hitting chamber of commerce mixers and speaking at civic and service clubs, Luckman years ago turned to e-mail marketing. Yes, blasting out an e-mail newsletter of sales tips and advertisements for his sales training programs.

He’d collect business cards to build his e-mail list. And then he decided to amp up his effort by subscribing to ready-made contact lists, including thousands of e-mail addresses.

“That is almost always when trouble starts,” says Ben Butler, director of network abuse for Go Daddy, a Scottsdale, Ariz., company that provides Internet services. It appears to be where Luckman’s trouble started.

As a result of sending his newsletter to those who never asked for it, Luckman attracted the attention of Spamhaus, an organization based in London and Geneva, Switzerland.

Spamhaus blacklists those who send solicitations without first getting recipients to opt in. They catch spammers by scattering e-mail addresses owned by Spamhaus around the Web, where they are often scraped up by services that sell e-mail lists.

Many Internet and e-mail service providers take Spamhaus’ blacklists very seriously — seriously enough to shut Luckman down.

“It’s almost like the Mafia,” Luckman says, sitting in the conference room at the San Jose Innovation Center downtown, where he conducts his training sessions.

You might be thinking: “Good. You spam. You die (at least digitally).” That’s Spamhaus’ stance.

But I’d argue otherwise. I don’t put Luckman in a class with the real bad guys. First, he’s following the federal anti-spam law. He sends his bulk e-mail from his real e-mail address. The e-mail includes his name (sometimes even his picture) and he provides a link through which recipients can ask to stop receiving his mail.

But Spamhaus, Luckman says, “puts me in the same category that they put those people in who send out the Viagra ads and penis enlargement ads to millions.”

Many praise Spamhaus for shutting down the annoying and even dangerous. But Luckman sees it as a bully who makes life tougher for small businesses like his.

Spamhaus offers no apologies. “This is a particularly reprehensible practice,” Richard Cox, Spamhaus’ chief information officer, says of sending e-mail to those who have not asked to receive it.

Luckman may well be following U.S. law, says Cox, who lives in the United Kingdom (he declined to be more specific for security reasons), but the law doesn’t go far enough. Spamhaus believes anyone receiving commercial e-mail should have requested it, preferably by registering on a website and by responding to a one-time e-mail confirmation.

In a tough spot

Butler, whose Go Daddy suspended the domain name for Luckman’s website after receiving a notice from Spamhaus, says the company has little choice but to shut down identified spammers.

For one thing, Go Daddy can’t be seen as condoning spam. And, Butler says, Spamhaus targets spammers by Internet protocol address, a broad designation that could lead to e-mail providers blocking thousands of innocent Go Daddy customers if the company failed to act.

Go Daddy is happy to help Luckman get back in Spamhaus’ good graces by cleaning up mail lists and moving to an opt-in system. But Luckman doesn’t believe he should have to follow rules beyond what the law requires. How, he asks, can he land new accounts if he can market only to those who already know him?

“One person’s spam,” Luckman says, “is another person’s treasure.”

Treasure? I wouldn’t go that far. But Luckman does have my sympathy.

Contact Mike Cassidy at mcassidy@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5536. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mikecassidy.