I'm sure that by now you've heard about Brian McWilliam's expose on spammers, Spam Kings. I'd read a very flattering Slashdot review by Michael Gracie, and decided to check it out. Like Gracie, I enjoyed the book and will probably never look at the many spams I receive in my inbox everyday the same way. While the book is certainly no treasure of English prose or what-have-you, there are worse ways to wile away long afternoons than reading about spammers like David Hawke and Dr. Fatburn, or anti-spammers like the mysterious Shiksaa. If you've ever wanted to know about the creeps responsible for all those penis enlargement ads in your email, this is a book you'll want. It reads in some ways like Hackers, except here we read about the anti-heroes of cyberspace.

At several points in the book, I caught myself admiring some of the technical ingenuity of these spammmers. I'd always wondered how these people could possibly make any money--I assumed that no one with a damn bit of sense would ever order their products. Apparently, I was quite mistaken--there are plenty of suckers out there willing to shell out $30 or so for a box of pills they could just as easily have walked into a gas station and bought for $5 right off the counter. Even if you only get three successful sales out of 3,000,000 emails, that's damn good considering you didn't have to pay postage to send them out.

The trick to being a good spammer is knowing how to keep your identity and true location of your order pages secret. You also have to be able and willing to react quickly to shut-downs--always stepping just a few feet away from the smashing hammer. You also have to be savvy to the law and, er, proactive when it comes to blacklists. Spam Kings is full of examples of spammers suing anit-spammers. The idea is not so much to win as to scare the anti-spammers with the threat of a lawsuit, which, as we all know, costs money no matter who wins.

Of course, with a book like this it's hard to maintain momentum. McWilliams does a fairly good job of investing us in the characters and drumming up suspense, but eventually I discovered myself contemplating putting it down. The big problem is that the characters and the things they do really aren't that interesting (particularly the anti-spammers). I caught myself asking, "Why am I reading a transcription of another of Shiksaa's AOL chats?" I also grew bored with the various descriptions and logs of Nanae (the anti-spammer message board). To be frank, I find the bad guys here much, much more interesting than the good guys (is it any wonder why people read Dante's Inferno and nothing else?) Still, even the bad guys aren't painted with deft strokes, but handled more like an extended USA Today story.

In short, Brian could have probably condensed or omitted a few chapters and focused more on what's really interesting about spam--namely, the motivations and twisted logic of those who shove it down our email chutes.