For Orlando Soto,
No Day Is Complete
Without Some Spam

NEW YORK -- Orlando Soto looks forward each evening to spending time on his home computer after work. But when he logged on one Wednesday night last month, he was disappointed: There were 17 spam e-mail messages waiting for him.

"Only 17," he lamented, scrolling through them. "That's a very light day."

Mr. Soto routinely comes home to some 150 e-mail pitches, and he loves getting them all. The 45-year-old grandfather opens most of them. He answers spam questionnaires. And he buys stuff pitched in spam e-mail -- again and again. "Everyday people call it spam," says Mr. Soto, who prefers calling it "unsolicited" e-mail. "But I'm open to everything."

If everyone hated spam, it would disappear. But like the traditional direct-mail marketers and telemarketers who came before them, spammers survive public outrage, filters, lawsuits and regulations because innumerable times a day, somebody, somewhere responds with money.

One such somebody is Mr. Soto. He buys spam-pitched aromatherapy oils for his wife and pharmaceuticals for himself. His bookcases are lined with first-edition mystery novels he bought via spam. In a corner of his two-bedroom midtown-Manhattan apartment stands an antique pinball machine bought via spam. He plays Internet bingo at five cents a game on a Web site pitched to him by spam a few weeks ago. He buys stuff via spam for himself and to resell on Web sites he sets up -- a business idea he got from a spam pitch.

Spam helps him "unwind" and "lose the stress of the day," Mr. Soto says.

He's the kind of person spammers love: a serial buyer. He says that he sometimes spends hundreds of dollars a week buying via spam. Most spam responders are one-time customers, e-mail marketers say, so repeaters make all the difference. Scott Richter, who runs a mass e-mailing company called Optinrealbig.com LLC in Westminster, Colo., says about a fifth of those who order his vitamins and other products buy again. "Those repeat buyers help generate a bulk of the revenue," he says.

There must be a lot of Mr. Sotos out there. In a survey by MailShell, a San Francisco antispam company, 8% of respondents said they have bought products via spam. Spammers say that percentage is probably low because many people are too embarrassed to admit responding to spam.

Spammers say they typically need just one buyer per 10,000 spam messages to break even. Mr. Soto recently spent more than $100 on vitamins from a spam pitch that touted: "Buy 1, get 2 free, plus free shipping!" If this particular solicitation was typical, spam experts say, the spammer probably sent it to about five million people with a commission of about 30%. If 500 buyers averaged spending what Mr. Soto spent on the vitamins, the spammer would bring in about $15,000 in revenue from the mailing.

Mr. Soto's daily spamfest starts after he gets home from his $40,000-a-year job as a building supervisor at NYRE Management, a real-estate firm that runs Manhattan apartment buildings. After dinner with his wife, he sits down in the leather chair in his home office and starts opening spam. He typically goes through 50 spam pitches before he finds one that's enticing, he says. He then pores over the pitches he has culled, winnowing them down to the must-haves.

On the recent Wednesday evening, Mr. Soto quickly reviewed the contents of his six e-mail accounts. "See, this is unsolicited," he said, pointing his cursor at a pitch aimed at mom-and-pop companies: "AOL Small Business News." He gave it some thought but decided it was from too big a company; he prefers spam from smaller purveyors. "No," he pronounced, skipping to the next spam: "Hi, Date Number 868." A boring adult-related pitch, he decided before moving on. The next was a pitch for mortgages, which he doesn't need.

"Here's an interesting one," he said, clicking on a message proclaiming: "Smoking Cigarettes Savings." It offered Newports -- his brand -- for $2.85 a pack, about a third of what he pays at a corner store near his home. He saved the message for later consideration.

The 17 messages didn't yield any buys that night, but Mr. Soto's wife, Paula Kennedy, offered a tour of the results of Mr. Soto's past spam sessions. On shelves in one bedroom were dozens of bottles of essential oils: clary sage, cinnamon, tea tree and carrot seed. Ms. Kennedy uses the oils in homemade soaps she sells via her aromatherapy business. Mr. Soto bought the oils via spam, she said, as well as ribbons, bags and other supplies for her business -- all stored in boxes piled on chairs and around the dining-room table.

Next, there were the spam-bought vitamins. "Let me show you," she said, retrieving a shoebox filled with plastic containers of bee-pollen complex, betaine hydrochloride and something called Oxy-Gen. Then Ms. Kennedy pointed to her doll and butterfly knick-knack collections, pieces of which Mr. Soto bought via spam. Elsewhere were other stacks of spam booty: a $220 computer server, computer parts and hundreds of software discs. A combination humidifier-air-conditioner that cost $650 sat unused on the living-room floor. The dining table was pushed against the china cabinet to make room for boxes that arrive almost daily.

Ms. Kennedy isn't bothered by her husband's fondness for spam. But for her part, she adds, "I don't fall for those."

Sometimes Mr. Soto feels sheepish about his spam habit. "You can get crazy," he says. "You can wrap yourself up in this stuff."

Mr. Soto used to haunt rummage sales, thrift shops and flea markets, but he hurt his back in the mid-1990s, so he turned to the Internet. He became an eBay devotee, staying up late to bid on software, self-help business tapes and other items. Soon he began buying via spam as well. "I was never anti," he said. "It's like a chase, a treasure hunt."

Eventually, spam prompted Mr. Soto to dabble in Internet entrepreneurship himself. He's bought fancy knives, leather jackets, stuffed animals, party supplies and software, all via spam, and then created Web sites to sell the items at a profit -- a skill he learned from another piece of spam. Mr. Soto says he also has bought some adult DVDs and videos via spam, but never got around to marketing them. He says he purchased two pornography Web sites, again via spam, and ran them for a while, but then he decided they weren't worth the trouble and disabled them. Likewise, he says he procured some provocative domain names via spam. In the past, Mr. Soto says he has sent out spam himself, but he doesn't any more for fear of the increasing multitude of federal and state spam regulations now on the books.

Mr. Soto says he has made very little money on these spam-inspired business ventures. "I wish I did," he says, adding that he doesn't have time to design all the Web sites required to resell stuff. "I buy it and then three weeks later it sits there," he concedes. "I do a lot of impulse buys."

But it's the bargains that keep him devouring spam, including a $150 metal detector he recently bought. Good spam, he says, leaves him feeling blessed and telling himself, "I can't believe this really came."

Write to Mylene Mangalindan at mylene.mangalindan@wsj.com

Updated March 15, 2004 12:00 a.m.

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