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Though last week’s Federal Trade Commission spam summit was a relatively sleepy affair, there was one major positive development for marketers: For once, they weren’t under fire.

The agenda and tone of last week’s event compared to a similar one four years ago were evidence of how drastically the relationship between marketers and inbox providers has changed.

In the FTC’s spam summit four years ago, for example, Direct Marketing Association president H. Robert Wientzen was roundly booed when he defended opt-out based e-mail marketing. Later, there was even a shoving match between two attendees.

“There was tension in the room last time,” said Trevor Hughes, executive director of the E-mail Sender and Provider Coalition. “Not just tension, but physical hostility. There was really a Bloods vs. Crips, Jets vs. Sharks thing going on.”

Moreover, the details panelists in the 2003 forum debated were almost without exception about how much leeway e-mail marketers should have.

Should federal legislation mandate opt-in based address gathering? Should marketers have to put “ADV” in their subject lines? Should the federal government establish a do-not-e-mail list? The Can-Spam Act hadn’t yet been passed.

In stark contrast, titles of the panels alone last week—“Uncovering the Malware Economy,” for example—offered evidence of how much the spam landscape has changed in the intervening four years and taken the focus off of mainstream marketing.

For one thing, marketers and Internet service providers have a common enemy now: malicious spammers who spread viruses and malware, and other criminals. Plus, the two sides have been talking.

“We’ve been working with these people for four years,” said Hughes. “I know the postmasters at the ISPs, and they look at me and the ESPC as a partner in trying to get things fixed. We disagree from time to time, and we certainly do get frustrated with some things the ISPs do, but by and large, these are partners who are trying to fight the same fight we’re trying to fight.”

Besides more open communication between ISPs and marketers, Laura Atkins, president of deliverability and ISP relations company Word to the Wise, credits the introduction of the “report spam” button as a key relationship changer between marketers and inbox providers.

“The ISPs, particularly the big ones, such as AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo, have really stepped up and put their filtering techniques into the hands of the end user,” she said. “That has convinced a lot of reputable marketers that when their mail is blocked, it isn’t being blocked frivolously, there really is something wrong.”

Also, whereas four years ago, marketers were “sweating bullets” because they didn’t know what the rules were or what they were going to be, Hughes added, everyone in the conference last week wanted the same thing: to eradicate criminal and fraudulent spam.

“It’s almost like we’re the legitimate businesses trying to gentrify the red-light district in town,” he said.