2. A SPAMMING PRIMER

How does a spammer obtain a million working e-mail addresses? Most simply, there are lists you can buy off the Internet. But there are also other, cheaper, ways. A ''dictionary attack,'' Colbert instructs, is when you blast reams of computer-generated potential e-mail names (Arnie1@hotmail.com, Arnie2@hotmail.com, Arnie3@hotmail.com . . .) and see which ones take. Another good tool is called a spider, a software program that can crawl through Web pages, looking for that telltale symbol: @. Then it simply records everything to the left and right of it, and bingo, it has a good e-mail address. (A good method for avoiding spam, then, is to always type your e-mail address on the Web this way: Arnie at hotmail.com or ArnieREMOVETHIS@hotmail.com. Humans can look at either and figure out what to do; software -- so far -- is helpless.)

Sitting at Richard's computer, I set out to launch my first spam. I append a file of e-mail addresses to the software along with my cover letter -- my spam. To keep everything vaguely legal, my spam is nothing more than a cheerful holiday greeting, at the end of which is a link to bowieltd.com, one of Colbert's Web sites.

The software starts firing, and my notes ricochet through cyberspace. The software monitors which e-mails are returned and tabulates their status. When an ''out of the office'' auto-reply comes back on one e-mail message, Colbert says: ''Oh, we love those. They confirm that the address is active.'' Within six minutes, on a single computer, running through a regular phone line, I have fired off 1,000 e-mail messages.

Which is one of the attractive things about spam for spammers. You don't have to leave your mobile home to do it. There's no door-to-door soliciting for clients, no annual conferences to attend. The business is all neatly contained on your desktop. For instance, how does a spammer find clients willing to hire him?

He spams.

Colbert used to find clients by trolling through AOL's member directory. Many of AOL's 35 million members fill out helpful ''online profiles'' when they join, listing their interests and activities. Colbert used those profiles to turn AOL into a rich and easy source of contacts. He would limit his search by typing in ''business opportunity'' or ''multilevel marketing'' in order to find the sort of small-time sales folks who might be receptive to his offer, then he would spam them all with his pitch.

''I might get 100 responses from 100,000 e-mails,'' Colbert says. He would write back personally to those, asking for the text of the ad they wanted to spam out and relaying his pricing structure: $300 to send out 100,000 messages or $900 for a million. From the 100 people who would agree to hear his personal pitch, he would usually land between two and five contracts. Although this might seem like a pitiful response rate -- one-five-hundredth of one percent is ruinous in any other market -- this one search for spam clients could yield Colbert as much as $14,000.

Colbert describes how he would set his computers for ''send'' with millions of e-mail messages queued up, then go to sleep and let the machinery make the money for him. ''I used to have nine computers bound over five DSL lines on a 10 meg pipe feeding 500K per second per computer,'' Colbert says. ''That's a million e-mails an hour per computer, nine million an hour on a good day.''