Yahoo's case, filed in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, accuses East Coast Exotics Entertainment Group Inc., and Epoth LLC of disguising their identities, designing e-mail messages to get around its spam filters and using non-sexually explicit subject lines to conceal sexually explicit e-mails.
Epoth does not send "any kind of direct-marketing mail to anyone," said Steve Kupperman, the company's director of affiliate operations. He said Epoth operates several subscription-based adult Web sites and pays affiliates to direct viewers to those sites. East Coast Exotics, he said, is a defunct former affiliate.
If an affiliate uses spam, Epoth terminates its contract and refuses to pay for any services the affiliate provided, Kupperman said. He added that the company wants to work with Yahoo to resolve the matter.
Microsoft filed suit against three alleged spammers, two of whom it did not identify. Named were the New Jersey operators of a company called Herbal Technologies. In an interview, Steven Blaier said his company, which sells male sexual enhancement products, does not send spam, but that sometimes he runs into difficulties with affiliates that resell his products.
Blaier said he shuts down accounts whenever he gets complaints that one of his resellers is using spam. "We've been fighting spam," he said. "I'm a small business, I can't afford this."
Blaier added that he is getting out of the herbal supplement business, in any case.
"The market for herbal supplements is not as good as it used to be when we first got in it," he said, "now it's like everybody is doing it out of their garage."
Washingtonpost.com staff writer David McGuire and Washington Post staff writer Michael Musgrove contributed to this report.
