On January 21, 1998, a Ziff-Davis journalist, Maria Seminerio wrote a story concerning annoy.com involving a similar incident involving America Online's Steve Case under the salacious and inaccurately misleading "New porno spam scam." Without speaking to anyone at annoy.com, Ms. Seminerio, (using the loosely defined and legally useless term "pornography,") stated categorically that "Annoy.com says the E-mail was sent 'to challenge the military by mocking its policy'."

We did not send the email, or state as much. The same story was picked up by CNN, and of course, Yahoo Top Stories, accusing annoy.com, in a false and defamatory manner, of being the "sender" of the email rather than simply facilitating the technological mechanism that delivered the message. Unprofessional, sensationalist and factually inaccurate are the least of the issues, not to mention the damage to annoy.com's reputation and association with "spam" (the bulk delivery of unsolicited commercial email), a practice which we have never engaged in and yet are forever doomed to be linked to on Internet search engines. We are demanding that Ziff-Davis remove the inaccurate, offensive and annoying annoy.com story from the Internet to ensure that it can no longer be accessed by anyone, as well as an apology and a retraction as visible as the story itself is.