The Lumber Cartel was a supposed conspiracy that backed anti-spammers. Somewhere around late 1997, some e-mail spammers and people who sympathized with them started to develop a conspiracy theory, which was later brought to the attention of anti-spammers in Usenet. According to them, the anti-spam efforts were funded by several major lumber companies. The logic in that is that these companies first destroy the forests, and make paper out of them, which is then in turn used to send bulk mail. Since sending e-mail spam is less costly and doesn't use paper at all, the lumber companies obviously wanted to stop it before it would surpass paper-based bulk mailing, which, according to conspiracy theorists, was already considerably cutting into their profits. Spammers in general tended to say that