I found this book to be very readable and informative. Not only that, but it sparked my interest to the point that I chased down some of the people mentioned in the book to find out what they thought about their inclusion. More on that later though..

Spam Kings - The Real Story. Behind the High Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills and *#?% Enlargements.

Brian McWilliams - Author
Published by: O'Reilly Media
ISBN: 0-596-00732-9

Price - £11.16 (April 2005) - Amazon



Featuring a bright yellow dustjacket with the top half of a rather mad looking man's face (with dollar signs for pupils) Spam Kings is a book which certainly gets your attention the first time you see it.

As far as reading it goes, I really enjoyed it. It reads more like an interesting novel about a group of megalomaniacs trying to take over the world than a book about what can be a highly technical subject.

I would guess rather than being aimed at system administrators and so on, this book is more aimed towards the casual user of the internet, who is interested in finding out about the personalities behind spam and anti-spam activists.

Ordinarily I would copy out each chapter title and contents of the book here, but in this case I'm not going to. Each chapter of the book has been sub-divided into smaller sections which flow very well, but don't really lend themselves to explanations of the usual sort.

As said before, this book goes into the personalities of the spam world, rather than the technicalities. To start the book off, we meet Davis Wolfgang Hawke, who is destined to see resounding success then a nasty fall as a spammer. McWilliams gets right into the background of this fellow, following his forays into the American Nazi organisations and his slow turn to spamming as a means of income.

Out of necessity I believe, McWilliams has chosen some outstanding personalities to follow through this book. On the one side, we have the ex-Nazi spammer poisoning the internet with millions of emails pushing anything from Viagra to penis enlargement devices and on the other, we have shiksaa.

We are introduced to shiksaa in chapter two and find she is as different a character from Hawke as it is possible to be.

Shiksaa is an anti-spam activist. The way McWilliams introduced her, presented her as a "forty something, mild mannered computer novice" whose alias shiksaa would "strike fear into the hearts of spammers anywhere".

Shiksaa started out as a very ordinary user of the internet and gradually found herself turning into an extra ordinary spam fighter. She has been accused of running SPEWS (an anti spam block list) and she no doubt played a large part in bringing Scott Richter (of OptInRealBig fame) to justice. Obviously she has a fairly strong personality.

These two characters are integral to the way the book is structured. Throughtout the book, McWilliams shows just how small the Internet can be, with shiksaa and Hawke constantly almost, but not quite crossing each others paths. This introduces an unusual tension into a book like this and I found myself avidly turning pages to find out what happened next.

As well as these two main characters, the book holds a host of other characters who also play a big part in the spam world. In addition, it makes readers aware of the various newsgroups which exist to allow spam fighters to talk about strategies and new spammers they have come across.

The book in itself is a great read. I found it to be highly informative and if it did nothing else, it made the humanity of the people involved in the spam world, stand out.

Its sometimes very hard to equate the spam email in your inbox with a real life, walking, talking person - or the other real life, walking, talking people who are trying to stop it getting there. Spam Wars brings out the personalities of spammers and spam fighters and if for no other reason than this, I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the subject.

A note about this review.

Shortly after I read this book, I visited one of the newsgroups mentioned above to get a picture for myself about spammers and anti-spammers. Were anti-spammers a bunch of kooks, or were they people with real personalities who just happened to hate spam?

Of course, I found they were the latter. The newsgroup I visited was news.admin.net-abuse.email, or NANAE for short.

This is one of the main newsgroups for discussion of spammers and spam fighting. In addition, until recently, shiksaa used to hang around in there. As I recently found out, she doesn't spend as much time in there as she used to, however she still drops in occasionally.

I went in there to find out a little more about the subject. McWilliams book had stirred my curiousity and I figured the best way to solve that was to look and learn.

Fairly quickly I learned there was a certain amount of conflict regarding McWilliams book. Shiksaa protested violently to being made one of the main characters in the book and identified to the level she was. She said there were many other people in the anti-spam community who were more worthy of that level of recognition than she, and perhaps she is right. While all the information McWilliams published about shiksaa was in the public domain, perhaps it might have done without being republished.

On the other hand, as a writer myself, I can quite understand why McWilliams used shiksaa to the point he did. Her charisma and personality, as well as the stark contrast in computer knowledge between her and the spammers, made shiksaa a natural choice for a main protagonist.

Shiksaa remains adamant. She sent me a series of emails stating how she only agreed to talk to McWilliams about an article and that nothing was mentioned about a book and also that she hadn't read any more than the first chapter of the book. This may have changed since I received her email though.

On the other hand, McWilliams emailed me when he found I was doing a review on the book. When I asked him about shiksaa and her atitude to the book, he was under the impression that shiksaa had come to think that being profiled in the book wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

There was a lot more to the conflict than I can really publish here, but if you are interested, go out and search for it. All the information is there.

All this really brought home to me exactly what I thought was the main point of the book. That penis enlargement email winging its way towards you right now is and has been a subject of incredible passion - from real people.

I found Spam Kings to be a fascinating read and I thouroughly recommend it.

Alan Rowe
www.inksmithy.co.uk