Laura Tessmer Atkins is a founding partner of the anti-spam consultancy and software firm Word to the Wise. Atkins has over seven years of experience in tracing Internet abuse and is a recognized leader in the anti-spam arena. At Word to the Wise, she advises clients on how to manage mailing risks, to respond to spam complaints and interact with ISPs. She also acts as a neutral arbitrator during spam blocking discussions with ISPs and blocking lists.

Prior to founding Word to the Wise, Atkins built and led the Mail Abuse Prevention Systems' outsourced abuse desk team. This project was founded to advise ISPs on the most effective ways to manage their customers and complaints about their customer's behavior. While there, she established and managed the abuse desk for a tier one backbone provider. She left MAPS to found Word to the Wise, a consulting group for ISP abuse desks, email service providers and email marketers.

In addition to running Word to the Wise, Atkins is also the President of the non-profit, public benefit group The SpamCon Foundation. The SpamCon Foundation protects email as a viable communication and commerce medium by supporting measures to reduce the amount of unsolicited email that crosses private networks, while ensuring that valid email reaches its destination. Atkins has spoken on the issue of spam to many private and public groups, including the spam forum held by the FTC in May of 2003.

Steve Atkins is a founding partner with Word to the Wise, a Palo Alto based consulting company specialising in email issues. We develop high-performance ticketing software for abuse desks and spam filtering infrastructure for ISPs. We consult on policy and procedural issues for abuse desks and bulk mailers, deliverability issues for senders of legitimate email. We provide technical and forensic assistance to lawyers and law enforcement in spam and other email cases. We advise state, federal and foreign governments on spam legislation and policy.

We also provide several free services to the community, including the SamSpade.org website, providing easy access to a number of network diagnostics tools, the SamSpade for Windows network diagnostic tools application and the cbl.abuseat.org spam filtering list.

Prior to founding Word to the Wise, Steve was a system architect for UltraDNS, a distributed DNS service serving a number of top level domains and large companies and prior to that a microprocessor designer, developing arithmetic units for Athlon, Alpha, Transputer and Chameleon.