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Some of my best friends are old-school direct marketers. In fact, I’d rather go drinking with a gang of them than a bunch of preening agency-type brand advertisers any day. The reason: the most successful DMers are results oriented, and they generally don’t concern themselves with trivialities.

They also spend a large portion of their professional lives ignoring fools—when agency “creatives” claim direct response ads are ugly, for example, or when they’re cornered at a cocktail party by someone who claims to hate “junk” mail even though they’ve ordered from 15 different catalogs in the last 12 months.

What do DMers do when confronted by stupidity and/or ignorance about their craft? Generally they ignore it and go about the business of making money. It’s an attitude that generally serves them well—except when it comes to e-mail.

According to a Direct Magazine survey of DMers concerning the online practices scheduled to come out in September’s issue, 14% of traditional business-to-consumer DMers say they send marketing e-mails to people on an opt-out basis—that would be spam for members of the Utah legislature who need all things Internet explained to them.

The good news is the percentage of DMers who say they send unsolicited e-mail is significantly lower than last year’s 23%. But 14%? That’s more than one in 10.

And it’s not just fly-by-night direct marketers that are spamming. I personally have received unsolicited e-mail from Circuit City, Kmart, Colgate-Palmolive, Williams-Sonoma, Plow & Hearth and, of all things, Smithsonian magazine.

Ironically, the picture is significantly brighter among business-to-business marketers where recipients tend to be more forgiving of sales pitches. Just 3.1% of the b-to-b DMers surveyed by Direct said their firms send e-mail on an opt-out basis this year, compared to 16.7% last year.

Theoretically, b-to-c marketers stand the most to lose if recipients perceive their messages as spam because they likely encounter more AOL, Yahoo and Gmail addresses than their b-to-b counterparts.

Inbox providers, such as Yahoo, AOL and Gmail, all use the percentage of people who hit the “report spam” button for a particular sender as the No. 1 gage in considering whether to deliver incoming e-mail to users’ inboxes or not.

By all accounts, any sender who gets a complaint rate higher than 0.5% will have serious delivery issues at these ISPs.

So why risk it? Part of the problem may be that e-mail isn’t a big enough contributor to most companies’ bottom lines to take all that seriously. According to the Direct Marketing Association, in 2007 e-mail is expected to account for just 1.1% of all DM-driven sales.

As a result, the executive in charge of the marketing budget is probably not all that attuned to the do’s and don’ts of e-mail marketing. “Will it build our list more quickly? Is it legal? Yes? Then shut up, please and start mailing those names” is probably a close approximation of the discussions taking place at many of these b-to-c marketing firms who still spam.

Soon enough, though—if it’s not already happening—firms sending messages on an opt-out basis will begin failing to get their campaigns delivered. If they haven’t already discovered it, they will also come to the painful realization that ISPs are under no obligation to deliver their e-mail.

And as a result, they won’t be able to communicate with even their best customers through a channel that returns a whopping $57.25 for every dollar spent on it, according to the DMA, all because they simply refuse to believe that the rules are different with e-mail than with direct mail.

Though they’re a heck of a lot of fun to drink with, sometimes my DMer friends can be mind-bogglingly stupid.

Look for the rest of the survey results in the next issue of Direct magazine.