Like the air we breathe, spam email is here whether we like it or not. This week I’m taking a slight departure from our usual one-on-one profile of a person involved in technology. Instead, we’ll hear from four players in the Tacoma tech community on the topic of spam email.

Receiving unwanted advertising via email has long been a source of frustration for Internet users. The debates on the subject range from aggressive anti-spammers to apathetic resignation to those who gleefully utilize spam to their advantage.

Weighing in with their personal opinions are Rob Greenlee, Mitch Ratcliffe, Jim Crabbe and Harry Widdifield. Greenlee is Marketing Director for Personal Designs Concepts and host of WebTalkGuys Radio. He is also the Vice Chairman of the Tacoma Technology Consortium. Ratcliffe has been Chief Content Officer at On24.com. He founded Big Garden Ventures and has been a commentator on technology and business for CNN, Fox News and NPR. Crabbe is co-founder of the Tacoma Network, a non-profit high-tech networking and advocacy group for investors, start-ups, developers, and traditional business. Widdifield is President and CEO of InformHarry.com, a Tacoma-based online political and opinion forum.

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R. Greenlee: Should companies be allowed to spend you spam in your email box?

Widdifield: Absolutely, why shouldn’t they? I figure I get up in the morning, turn on my TV and somebody’s trying to sell me hemorrhoid cream. I go to my mailbox and see Val-Pak coupons with ads for cutesy checks and discount rate carpet cleaners that come in their beat-up jalopies to clean my carpet. I don’t take the time to write a letter to Val-Pak. But boy, you send one email to someone that doesn’t want it and somebody’s going to take an hour writing what they think is a well-crafted email that I really don’t care about.

Ratcliffe: What you’re saying is you’ve sent unwanted email?

Widdifield: Exactly. We had a service on InformHarry.com where people could find out if their credit cards got hacked. We were trying to do a public service and we still got some people saying, “We don’t want you to get in our faces about a public service. You send someone an email once and they spend more time writing you back than they would hitting the delete key. That’s crazy. It’s a delete key - find it. It’s real easy.

R. Greenlee: I get probably 100 emails a day and half of them are spam. Harry has a good point. We get direct mail in our postal mailbox everyday and people just throw it in the garbage.

Widdifield: Don’t get me wrong. I’ve heard all the arguments that people pay for Internet service. Well, last I heard I pay a hefty tax dollar for my postal service and I pay dearly for cable TV.

Ratcliffe: The difference is we should expect people to do better than just spam on the net. From my perspective running On24.com where we personalize newscasts down to just the stories you want, we should just give you the ads you’d be interested in. Then it doesn’t feel so much like spam. Spam is like having to go to the doctor and getting a shot. You’d just like to go to the doctor and hear that you’re OK!

Widdifield: I gotta say - if one more person tried to sell me Viagra online I’m going to get a complex!

R. Greenlee: People are scared of spam, I think, because it’s so easy to send and it could get out of hand. Government and political bodies have passed laws restricting the use of spam. Direct mail, in contrast, is expensive to send and kind of has a natural limiting characteristic.

Widdifield: It’s like the sexual harassment thing. If you ask someone out once, that’s one thing. But if you keep asking…

Crabbe: What you’re saying is there is a fine line between solicitation and spam.

Widdifield: Right. If I send you one email, leave me alone. If I send you twenty, you’re within your rights to say ‘hey, back off’.

R. Greenlee: That’s really where email marketing is effective - targeting the end-user more effectively. If you’re just sending out mass emails using the shotgun approach, you’re not going to be successful.

Crabbe: I think like anything else, it’s like a free market approach. The companies that abuse email are the ones that are going to suffer in the long run. I run a networking group with over 600 people registered. We get our fair share of spam or solicitation. With solicitation, I get an email once, I ask them not to contact me again and it ends. Spam would be something you get with a Hotmail account where I see my name in a block of 200 other people that have received this wonderful message and I find it annoying and disappointing.

Ratcliffe: You could have opted out of that.

Crabbe: For fun I tried to experiment with some of the spam. I would call in to the company and been told ‘Oh, we’re not really the company. We just handle their marketing and we can’t remove you from our email list. You have to call another company.

Widdifield: You spend a lot of time ignoring your delete key.

Crabbe: I use the delete key a lot but I find the delete key is a waste of my virtual space, my memory and my time. It can still take you a long time to delete spam if I have a slower computer and connection and are using a web-based system like Hotmail. If you let your Hotmail account go for three days, you’re going to average about 150 emails that are unwanted. It may take you a good five minutes to clean those out.

R. Greenlee: If you’re a heavy email user, when you get so many emails in your In Box, you have a tendency to just leave it alone as it gets out of control. You then get frustrated because you can’t keep up with it. I think over time if spam proliferates, we’re going to see people using email as a one-way communication and relying on instant messaging for two-way communication.

Ratcliffe: That reminds of of the old Lenny Bruce bit “Eat, Sleep and Crap”. It’s about the evolution of police in society. Everybody has a place where they eat, sleep and crap. And you’ve got to have somebody to say, “Well, you can’t crap there because that’s where we eat”. So you hire somebody to stand there. Now because they’re telling everyone they can’t sleep there or whatever, they’re the Nazi’s. Everybody starts protesting ‘Hey, you’re the Nazi’s’. ‘Well, I just work for the guy who told me that you can’t crap here’. And that’s where we are right now on the Net. We haven’t gotten to the point where identifiable brownshirts have emerged.

R. Greenlee: This should stimulate the software companies that make the email clients to put more filters in.

Ratcliffe: What we ought to have is an instant reply button that floods them with email. Drown them in their own crap.

Crabbe: The hotmail service puts in sniffers and filters to try to block certain email addresses - that’s on the backside. But on the front side they still allow a person to create a new account. So in essence, you can block all the email coming from me if I decide to spam you. But I’ll just create a new account and come back and spam you from a new email address.

R. Greenlee: What do you think when someone sends you an email that has a cc line of 50 people that have their email addresses exposed.

Widdifield: I collect the emails so I can spam them! No - I find my friggin’ delete key.

Ratcliffe: So you know what it is - we’re doomed!

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The full audio roundtable discussion on spam email can be heard at www.webtalkguys.com. The radio show occasionally gathers a group of technology players in our production studio, throws out a hot topic and turns on the microphones. These sessions are always lively. If you would like to participate in a roundtable discussion for broadcast on WebTalkGuys Radio, contact Rob Greenlee at robg@webtalkguys.com.

(Editor's note: Dana Greenlee, president of LoudVox.com and co-host of the WebTalkGuys Radio Show, will be writing a technology column for Friday editions of the Index. WebTalkGuys, which features technology news and interviews, can be heard Saturdays from 11 a.m. to noon on KLAY 1180 AM in the Tacoma/Seattle area. Past show and interviews are also webcast via the Internet at http:www.webtalkguys.com).