Who Killed E-Mail? Meet The Inventors of Spam

I was absolutely shocked to see a reference to a book by the infamous Canter & Siegel in one of the publishing discussion lists I participate in.

This is the response I sent:

Are they still around? I find their behavior utterly loathsome! Maybe 12 years ago when I was very new with Internet marketing, I ordered Canter & Siegel’s book from a book club–and lo and behold it was, “we invented newsgroup spamming, aren’t we great?”

Yup–these two are the ones who gleefully take credit for inventing spam, and thus killing the Internet as a viable one-to-one and one-to-many communication tool. I’m sure there’s a special circle in Hell reserved for them and a few thousand of their followers. If there is any justice, they will spend lifetimes chained to their computers, deleting unwanted mail until their eyes give out and they get a jolt of electricity every time they fall asleep over their keyboards. I wouldn’t give them a penny, I don’t care *what* they’ve done since.

Normally, if I buy a book I’m not crazy about, I figure it’s my tough luck and I give it away. I had a moral problem with this one, and I returned it for full credit–with a note encouraging them to think about dropping it from their catalog.