In one of the strangest Net developments of the week, former spam king Sanford Wallace announced that he would henceforth do battle against the evil forces he once led those who drive Net users insane by clogging online discussion groups and individual email inboxes with advertising.

Mr Wallace, who delighted in the nickname "Spamford", has been possibly the most despised man in the Internet world. Arguing both that businesses have a right to send email advertisements and that many Internet users enjoy receiving them, he flamboyantly championed the cause of spam, the informal name for UCE Unsolicited Commercial Email. (The name is assumed to come from the Monty Python skit about the restaurant which serves nothing but spam therefore, a suitable term for email advertisements which are mass-mailed to multiple recipients.)

But spam has become more than an annoyance for email users, who often find plugs for everything from home loan schemes to pornographic sites stuffed in their accounts when they log on. Spam is a serious problem for systems administrators because its sheer bandwidth and memory bulk can place a strain on hardware, software and Internet connections. A recent report claimed that spam costs US business tens of millions of dollars in productivity every day. Internet service providers from the smallest local operator to the telecom giants consider it a scourge. Spam has also threatened to bring down the Internet's vast collection of discussion groups, UseNet.

However, a number of high-profile court cases brought against spammers by Internet service providers like America Online have begun to turn the tide. AOL won multi-million dollar claims against some of the large pornographers who were routinely spamming its members.

Mr Wallace himself had a $2 million (£1.24 million) judgment handed down against him in a suit filed by Earthlink Network. A few weeks ago, to general scepticism, he announced he was leaving the spam business.

Then this week, out came a press release stating that the spam king was going to work as an anti-spam consultant for the Atlanta, Georgia, law firm of Hunton and Williams the very firm which brought the suit on behalf of Earthlink.

He now says he wants to work on behalf of Internet users to "clean the streets" and claims that spam is deservedly detested. You can read about his conversion at http: //www.wired.com/news/news/

politics/story/12245.html Meanwhile, his former partner in spam, Mr Walt Rines, has also rejected the idea of unwanted email. He's behind a new company, Global Technology Marketing International, and a new scheme, dubbed the Spambone, which would create a network in which spam was sent to those who opted to receive it.

The model for the network is based on the successful, free email and Web page services on the Net, like Geocities and Hotmail, where users are willing to trade looking at some advertising in exchange for a free email account or Web page.

Mr Rines has what must be one of the most bizarre company manifestos, posted at the GTMI site, headlined "Our Unique Vision and Ideology". Spam haters familiar with Mr Wallace and Mr Rines's former pronouncements may find their jaws on the floor reading such born-again sentiments as these: "Marketers demand access to this new [Internet] audience, via a medium which offers all the power and flexibility that email offers, but spamming (sending of unsolicited email advertising) is a virtually outlawed practice, and with good reason. It ends up being basically a free lunch for advertisers, and no one else gets any benefit. In fact, the negative aspects (costs, cleanup, etc.), are shifted to innocent third parties!"

Odd coming from Mr Rines, but the general idea of the Spambone has been welcomed by even ardent antispammers as a way of eliminating unwanted junk email and controlling what is sent out. Will it work? It could, and indeed, it might have to, if email advertising is to survive in the US, several anti-spam bills are pending which would outlaw it completely, and they would likely set an international model for forcefully clearing the cyberworld of spam.

Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish- times.ie