When I signed on to BlackMarketMoney.com for the first time, I saw a page where my sales stats would be displayed. A preferences section included a form where I could specify account numbers for my commission payments. There were also pages with suggested ad copy and graphics files, as well as an updated list of the various domains we affiliates were supposed to advertise in our spams.

But what really caught my eye was a note at the site that insisted all affiliate spams include an "unsubscribe link." Two huge archives were also available for download, containing lists of "remove" addresses. The October list held around 202,000 e-mails, while the November list had over 282,000 addresses. Sales affiliates were instructed to scrub their mailing lists to remove these names.

To my amazement, a quick search revealed that my e-mail address had successfully made it onto the November remove list. But nearly 10 days had passed since I had asked to be unsubscribed, and the fake-Rolex spams were still rolling in. Obviously, my fellow affiliates couldn't be bothered to clean their rolls of my e-mail address.

As I scanned the remove lists, I was startled at some of the other e-mails. Hundreds of people with dot-gov, dot-mil, and dot-edu addresses had asked for the Royal-Replicas.com spam to stop. (I'd always been told that spammers filter out these domains reflexively, because they generate way more complaints than sales.)

Other addresses jumped out at me. Lots of people from high-tech companies, including Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, had tried to unsubscribe. Dozens of people using ACM.org and IEEE.org addresses (professional engineering and computer science organizations) were also on the remove lists.

These people were supposed to be geeks -- why were they bothering to unsubscribe? Surely they knew the conventional wisdom: You don't negotiate with terrorists, and you don't unsubscribe from spam lists.

Scrolling through the addresses, I realized someone had tried to sabotage the Royal-Replicas.com remove lists. Nonexistent addresses -- ending in netscape.gov and pooper.gov, for example -- were mixed in with real ones. The lists also included many "celebrity" unsubscribe requests, including ones from arlen_specter@specter.senate.gov, barbara.bush@whitehouse.gov, condaliza.rice@whitehouse.gov, and conrad_burns@burns.senate.gov.

While I understood the rage that led someone to submit phony addresses, I was also a bit ticked off at the perpetrator. Wouldn't all this junk on the remove lists make spamming affiliates reluctant to use them?

BlackMarketMoney.com also offered a smaller "domain" filter list. Affiliates were supposed to configure their list-processing software to remove all e-mail addresses that included special keywords or domains. Among the 825 filter words were obvious ones such as "abuse" and "admin," but there were also some head-scratchers: "beavis," "douche" and "orgy."

The domain filter list also included sites of well-known anti-spammers, including spews.org, chickenboner.com, scconsult.com and barbieslapp.com. Other notable domains on the filter list were kuro5hin.org, salonmagazine.com and, inexplicably, womenbehindbars.com.

I decided to try contacting some of the people on the remove lists. I'd remind them that clicking spammers' unsubscribe links has been known to install Trojan horse software on your computer. What's more, you can't even trust some mainstream companies. A recent study found that Amazon and other high-profile firms are sometimes embarrassingly lax in honoring remove requests.

What were these people thinking when they handed over their addresses to the fake-Rolex spammers?

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