Louis Philippe claims the communications giant owes him $1,600 for the time he has spent dealing with unsolicited e-mails.

When Louis Philippe first started getting unsolicited e-mails asking if he wanted to see women in bikinis or get rid of his debt, he simply deleted them from his America Online inbox.

He hoped the bulk e-mails, commonly known as Spam, would stop coming.

But they didn’t. They multiplied. And Philippe eventually got fed up and started complaining to AOL.

Two years later, the 48-year-old music and theater producer is taking America Online Inc. to small claims court.

He believes the communications giant owes him $1,680 for the time he has invested in dealing with the e-mails and for the money he has spent to fix his computer after it was infected by viruses sent with the unwanted messages.

“I anticipate AOL to send some haughty attorney to intimidate me and laugh my case out of court,” Philippe said.

A graduate of St. Dominic High School who grew up in Lewiston and now lives in Portland, Philippe is ready to put up a fight.

“Not for the money,” he said, “but for the principle.”

Filters

A spokesman for AOL described Philippe’s lawsuit as completely frivolous.

Nicholas Graham said AOL officials will contest the suit because the company is doing everything in its power to curtail the amount of Spam received by members.

“We attack Spam on a number of different fronts,” Graham said. “And we have the best anti-Spam filters.”

The filters block an average of two billion e-mails a day, Graham said, and AOL has pressed charges against more than 100 people and companies accused of sending Spam.

“Spam is a little bit like taxes. We all have to deal with it. It is never going to go away,” Graham said. “But we’re doing something every hour of every day to make it better.”

For Philippe, that hasn’t been enough.

Viruses

The director and president of Reindeer Group Inc., a Portland-based theater and record company, Philippe signed up with AOL in 1995. He pays $23.90 per month for unlimited access to the Internet.

He has set up three e-mail accounts – one for personal use, another for his company and a third for a specific record label that he manages.

The e-mails started showing up in all three inboxes two years ago.

Some advertised cheap prescription drugs and good deals on cocaine and marijuana. Others asked if he wanted to see photographs of naked girls, sign up for adult Web sites or operate his own online casino.

Two came with electronic viruses that weren’t detected and destroyed his hard drive, requiring him to pay $90 both times to reformat it.

“Every time that I sign on, I have a half-dozen e-mails,” Philippe said. “A few minutes here, a few minutes there, it adds up.”

Invoices

Philippe eventually called AOL’s customer service department to complain.

He claims that he was advised to do one of two things: set up his account to block specific e-mail addresses or create a list of e-mail addresses from which he was willing to accept messages.

He informed the customer service representative that those solutions wouldn’t work, because the unsolicited e-mails come from hundreds of different addresses and because he uses the account for business and he doesn’t want to block potential clients.

The AOL employee assured Philippe that the company was already aggressively tracking violators and that it could do nothing more to help him.

Philippe didn’t back down.

Following instructions in his contract with the Internet-service provider, he started forwarding every unsolicited e-mail to AOL. He also sent copies to the Federal Trade Commission.

Occasionally, he said, AOL e-mailed him a standard response stating its concerns about Spam.

Still, the e-mails kept coming.

So Philippe started charging AOL. He began mailing invoices to the accounts payable department, charging $10 an hour – a fee he described as nominal – to offset the costs of handling the unsolicited e-mails.

Overdue fees

Over the past year, Philippe has forwarded 5,000 e-mails, and the company has never responded to his invoices.

As a result, he filed a lawsuit against AOL in 9th District Court in Portland. He is asking for more than $1,600 in overdue service fees.

The case was scheduled to go before a judge Thursday, but AOL’s legal department filed a last-minute request asking for the case to be continued so it could find a local attorney to represent the company.

In the meantime, Philippe continues to send his bills.

He mailed his latest invoice on Sept. 23 for a total of $1,680. He attached a notice, informing the company that its account with him is “seriously overdue” and “services will continue to be imposed until the matter is resolved.”

No matter what happens in court, Philippe plans to continue using AOL. He likes many of its features and he finds it easy to navigate.

His only dissatisfaction, he said, is with the company’s response to Spam.

“I would like to be able to turn on my computer in the morning and not be bombarded with e-mails about how I can increase certain parts of my body. I know that I am not alone.”

lchmelecki@sunjournal.com