Here is a story that will give you some idea of exactly where e-mail marketing stands, midway through 2004.

And how you can make money from it.

I was looking forward to the "surprise package" after my recent Boardroom dinner.

The attendees had been leaders in the law, in journalism, in medicine, and in direct marketing. Some were faces I recognized from TV.

I was looking forward mostly to the promised list of contact information. I was ready to e-mail everyone, thank them for a wonderful evening, and offer them my best -- the work I do here and in my own newsletter. I was hoping, thereby, to win their trust and, hopefully, their help in focusing and re-starting my career.

Well it arrived, yesterday. I got a t-shirt, a book, a pair of blu-ray sunglasses, even a neat water bottle. Plus the list. There they all were -- names, addresses, phone numbers...

No e-mail addresses! (Well, except for the hosts.)

No e-mail addresses? How am I supposed to contact my new friends without e-mail addresses?

And then it hit me. Spam. All these bright, brilliant people are afraid someone on the list will sell their e-mail addresses to some spammer, or spam them themselves. E-mail is so easy to write, so easy to send, that no one wants it any more. In fact, we're scared of it.

This must change, somehow. I've described how it should change. No mail should be sent to a list unless the sender can prove it's 100% double opt-in. Every e-mail should have valuable information in it, stuff people want to read, stuff they'd pay for. And lists should be pruned regularly, so those who don't respond (or whose mail bounces) are taken off the list and have to make an affirmative effort to get back on.

Lists should be much, much smaller, in other words, and measured just like direct mail lists. Names that don't pay don't belong there.

But spam has scared so many of us, so completely, that we're no longer to trust anyone with our names. Even our friends. Even the people we just had a wonderful dinner with, the best and brightest among us.

What is the Clue? Just that, no matter what happens legally, or technologically, it's going to cost more, in the near-to-medium term, to build an effective e-mail list than it would to build an equally-effective paper list.

And it should. An e-mail address by itself is worthless. An e-mail respondent, on the other hand, is a treasure of immense value.

Anyone who takes this Clue and really uses it -- making personal invitations to their lists, delivering valuable information with each e-mail, pruning non-responsive names -- is going to make a lot of money.

No one else is, and no one else should.