E-mail marketer opts to make most of growing spam frustration. (Media & Technology).

Looking to take advantage of the rising tide of sentiment against unwanted e-mail, entrepreneur Gary Guseinov has launched a service allowing computer users to enroll in what he hopes will become a national opt-out database.

At the same time, Guseinov, chief executive of Network Dynamics LLC, is offering consumers the chance to select which solicitations they are willing to receive. Both the opt-in and opt-out lists will be sold to online marketers.

The L.A.-based company's National Do Not E-Mail List has signed up 10,000 consumers and landed one mass e-mail marketer - Huntington Beach-based Sharp Systems of America, the U.S. distribution arm of Japanese consumer electronics giant Sharp Corp.

Sharp sends out 250,000 e-mail advertisements per month and was led to Network Dynamics due to a growing concern over consumers threatening action over its unsolicited e-mail, said Craig Rittenhouse, vice president of marketing at Sharp Systems.

The threats "indicate how serious consumers are getting about spam. Our legal department has become more interested in addressing this recently," Rittenhouse said.

Working with Network Dynamics, Sharp still sends marketing e-mails to its list. Recipients are given a choice of doing nothing and continuing to get the e-mail 'or responding that they are no longer interested in the solicitations. Those responses are factored into a database of recipient preferences maintained by Network Dynamics and resold to other companies.

Rittenhouse sees the National. Do Not E-mail List as an improvement to its previous opt-out method, which simply offered uninterested e-mail recipients a chance to be taken off Sharp's list.

Starting this week, Sharp's e-mail recipients will be directed to the Network Dynamics database. There they can enter their e-mail address on the Do Not E-mail list.

Big plans

Though neither Guseinov nor Rittenhouse would disclose the value of the Sharp deal, Network Dynamics charges marketers from $375 to $1,500 per month. It also plans on providing e-mail marketing consulting services and anti-spain software.

Rittenhouse did say the cost of Network Dynamics' service is roughly the same as what Sharp pays for lists of consumer electronics owners and operators of small businesses.

So great is the spam pool that Guseinov, who started the company earlier this year, is projecting revenues of $900,000 in 2003 and $12 million in 2004. The company has six employees.

Such claims of rapid revenue growth are not uncommon in the Internet business, nor are they uncommon to Guseinov.

A co-founder of Web-based ad tracking firm Synergy Ventures, Guseinov and his partner, Stan Burns, told the Los Angeles Daily News in March 2000 they had built a business with $1 million in revenues in its first year.

"Our goal is to grow into a $100 million company by the end of 2002," Bums told the Daily News. "After a year of hard work, we're really starting to see the fruits of our labor."

With the bursting of the Internet bubble, the focus shifted to mass e-mailing, and now, through Network Dynamics, developing databases of e-mail addresses that will and won't take unsolicited communications.

Guseinov said his experience with mass email marketing revealed the lawlessness of the industry and the need for structure.

"Every business that sells to consumers suffers if there are no rules," he said. "Industry, not the government, needs to solve this."

While there is talk of federal legislation to protect consumers and businesses from the spam flood, no action has yet been taken. All efforts so far have been on the state level, where 33 legislatures have enacted a variety of anti-spam laws.

Since 1998, California has had two antispam laws in place. One requires marketers to indicate that their e-mail is an advertisement in the subject line of the e-mail. The other gives Internet service providers the right to sue spammers and receive $50 per e-mail in damages.

Both laws have been called ineffective, and refinements are now being studied.

"You often cannot track the e-mailers. They can hide their tracks so it's very time consuming and expensive to find them," said Michael Overly, a partner at Foley & Lardner in L.A.

National effort

The Direct Marketing Association, a trade group that represents companies doing e-mail marketing, is trying to develop a federally enforced Do Not E-mail list. The Computer Owners' Bill of Rights, a Senate bill introduced in March, would require the Federal Trade Commission to build and enforce a national Do Not E-mail registry. It is still in committee.

For the time being, Network Dynamics will try to find more companies and Internet service providers to sign on to its list.

Yet, even that strategy has its pitfalls.

"Network Dynamics has to be very careful about who they sell the list to. You can defeat the effort by selling to the wrong company," said Overly.

Meantime, online marketers simply want to be sure they are getting the best response possible from their lists while avoiding the growing wrath in Washington.

"We want a good clean list," said Rittenhouse. "That's gold for us."