These messages may come to your e-mail box soon, containing sales pitches on topics ranging from golf to porn. Over the past year, direct marketing has hit on-line USENET newsgroups, private e-mail boxes, e-mail discussion lists and Web sites.

The Internet community dubbed this practice as "spamming" after the popular British television restaurant sketch where a character orders a luncheon meat called "Spam" repeatedly, past the point of absurdity.

"Spammers flood the Internet with multiple copies of the same message in an attempt to force it on people who would not choose to receive it. They discovered the Holy Grail of direct marketing -- cheap, effective information distribution, which costs very little to them, but people have to wade through it -- and it uses a lot of bandwidth," says computer consultant Fred Elbel of Littleton, who developed a Web page of information about the topic (www.csn.net/~felbel/jnkmail.html).

Although annoying, is marketing through e-mail worse than through the traditional venues?

No, says Blaine Stuart, president of Broomfield-based Stuart International Trade (www.powerpromo.com/stuartrade), which provides telemarketing sales services to businesses.

"If you don't want a message, it just takes a second to delete it. It doesn't cost you anything; most Internet service providers offer a flat charge no matter how long you're logged on. Sending e-mail pitches is great for direct marketers to get their message in front of people who will read it."

Others agree. "Reaching consumers through e-mail is the key to success in doing business over the Internet, if done right," says Scott Nuanes, president of Boulder's BusinessLink (www.businesslink.net), which helps companies develop and distribute direct marketing material. And companies like the idea. "While at Comdex, we met with companies about it -- we were shocked that 95 percent of them were interested."

As a representative for Email Pro software, which gathers e-mail addresses for direct marketers, Stuart says e-mail marketing has big advantages. "Recipients wanting more information hit reply' -- they get all the information they need about a product in a return message. They don't have to use a phone or fax. It's a fully automated sales machine." On a recent week's mailing of 10,000, Stuart made $3,200 in net profit and $6,000 in sales and recorded a response rate of 1 to 5.

How do direct marketers get your e-mail address?

Jason Catlett, chief executive officer of Delaware-registered Junkbusters (www.junkbusters.com), whose mission is to free people from junk communication, says direct marketers either buy from brokers selling e-mail addresses or "there are dozens of software tools that automatically subscribe to as many e-mail discussion lists as possible and harvest the lists of e-mail addresses."

For example, Email Pro, the software Stuart uses, is launched into e-mail listservs, newsgroups and Web sites to "strip out all e-mail addresses. It sorts the addresses, removes duplicates, puts them into a database for later mailing in one simple step," reads Email Pro's advertisement.

Stuart also uses Stealth Mailer, which sends out 250,000 messages per hour to the collected addresses by "acting like 20 e-mail programs at once on separate computers." He provides Stealth's Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, or SMPT (which is used by all e-mail programs to send mail) with a list of 20 or more server identities, such as your ISP's domain name, to make it look like it came from that location.

"E-mail programs also let you change the return address line, where you can put in any address you want," Stuart explains. "It's not designed to hide your identity, but you don't want to get returns to that address, either."

All that makes the e-mail difficult to trace, according to Shelli Meyers, president of Boulder-based Indra's Net (www.indra.com). "It's like this: Someone can use our mail server to pass mail through usa.net with free e-mail from Juno. If they send 50,000 messages through our machine and we know about it, we can block it, but this way, we can't. It can bring down an entire server."

BusinessLink was shut down for three days when a spammer used the company's SMPT identity. "It's the equivalent of sending 40,000 pieces of mail to my house," Nuanes says.

Indra's Net has a disclaimer on their home page saying that anyone sending bulk mail through their server with the intent of spamming is subject to $1 per e-mail message. Indra's recently sent a bill for $59,000 to one such e-mailer, but hasn't heard back. BusinessLink is pursuing their matter through legal counsel.

Stuart does not advocate spam. "Tools like Email Pro do have the potential for being abused, but it's not the software, it's the ethics of the person using it."

BusinessLink's Nuanes maintains that it's only ethical to send e-mail to those who request information, such as on a form on a Web site or from other standard marketing practices that target specific groups. "We would never use fake e-mail addresses or go around appropriate ways of doing business. Brokers selling e-mail addresses don't tell buyers how to properly use them."

BusinessLink adds incentives for people to register at their Web site. "We give away (in a drawing) a Pentium computer each month just to get people to sign up to be on our e-mail list. You give us your permission to send e-mail to you. We won't sell or give your name to anyone else," Nuanes says.

Many people advocate legislation to get rid of spammers, similar to the now illegal practice of sending unsolicited faxes, according to Junkbuster's Catlett. CompuServe and Concentric recently won injunctions prohibiting Cyber Promotions from sending unsolicited e-mail to all addresses they maintain, and a Pennsylvania district judge allowed America Online to automatically limit the domain names Cyber Promotions can use so they can block the company's messages to their members unless the members specifically deactivate AOL's blocking filters.

Nevada, California, Virginia and Connecticut state senates also have introduced legislation that would make sending unsolicited ads to e-mail accounts a misdemeanor.

Shirley Sostre, an Internet attorney in Boulder, believes "it's difficult to draft this type of legislation. Even though some don't like it, e-mail marketing has its benefits. It's an inexpensive way for small businesses to get their word out to a lot of people. Instead, I'd like to see courts apply laws that already exist."

For instance, "Stealing identities and property are illegal -- it shouldn't matter whether it's electronic or not. Some spammers use fraudulent methods that may violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Wire Fraud Act. Colorado also has their own computer crime laws of deceptive trade practices."