Everybody with an email account gets junk mail. You know, the pitches for pills that will "enhance" or "enlarge" various body parts in anticipation of greater sexual gratification, college degrees that you haven't really earned (but which you nonetheless deserve and will help you make more $$$$), and pornography by the boatload. Even the best spam-fighting email filters can't seem to catch it all, and Bill Gates supposedly gets some four million spammed messages per day (although not necessarily directed at his personal email address).

For many people, that type of volume elevates spam from a mere irritant to a call to action: spam is, in the eyes of many, a modern-day plague upon the world of technological peace and harmony. It clogs networks and costs money in terms of lost productivity and bandwidth. Spammed messages constitute some sixty percent of today's email traffic (indeed, it undoubtedly constitutes a similar percentage of the messages that hit my inbox); sad to say, I get more email from spammers than from my real-world friends and acquaintances. Thinking of spamers as just friendly, well-meaning "bulk marketers" would be a mistake, however. And it brings to mind the old saying: "With friends like these, who needs enemies?"

Brian McWilliams' new book, Spam Kings: The Real Story Behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and @*X?% Enlargements, explores the shadowy world of the bottom feeders lurking in the underbelly of the Internet. He introduces readers to Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a former neo-Nazi who at one time managed to gross some $600,000.00 selling herbal male "enhancement" products over the Internet (Hawke also sold a host of other products, from detective kits to information on creating fake identities to material on how others could successfully enter the "bulk marketing" business). Even after he shed his neo-Nazi skin, Hawke operated in a shady twilight world that allowed everything from his casual use of many aliases to his acquisition of a South American "prostitute" to be his sex toy (Hawke managed to get a young woman from Columbia to serve as his "live-in prostitute," and as McWilliams' writes, "Even when he was working at his computer, she was on duty").

During the course of his research, McWilliams discovered that many spammers are somehow connected (perhaps in a six degrees of penis enlargement way); as a result, the book also exposes the reader to such characters as Sanford Wallace (called "Spamford" by his anti-spam foes), one of the original spam kings who contends that spam is protected by the First Amendment; Jason Vale, a former champion arm-wrestler and cancer survivor who insisted on bombarding people with email pitches for Laetrile as a cure for cancer, even despite a federal court order requiring him to desist; Alan Moore, otherwise known as "Dr. Fatburn" to purchasers of his diet pills; and a host of others. He also delves into the technical tricks of the trade, from computer viruses creating millions of "spam zombie" hosts to forged headers, open relays, harvesting tools, and more, providing excellent insight into how these bottom feeders find their prey.