It seemed like every netizen's worst nightmare: In mid-November, publicity-crazed spam king Sanford Wallace declared he was taking matters into his own hands after his latest Internet access provider 86'd him.
Along with partner Walt Rines and an unidentified third party, Wallace announced that he had formed a new company that would offer spammers high-speed T1 and T3 Internet connections over a dedicated backbone. A press release bragged of a "fully-meshed network operating at DS-3 speeds" and "multiple Lucent 5E12 switches."
"Finally, bulk emailers will have an opportunity to legitimize this new industry," said Rines.
Predictably, the howls from Usenet's net-abuse.email community could be heard as far off as z-netz.test. But after an intense and highly detailed technical investigation by Net activists, many concluded that Wallace's dedicated spam backbone - quickly dubbed the "SpamBone" - lacked meat.
And though Wallace et al. expected the SpamBone to MAKE MONEY FAST, there's still no sign of either the network or the cash to make it happen.
"We're still working out some of the details so it's unfortunately been delayed a little more than we expected originally," Wallace said in an interview last week. "We are still working toward getting this thing up in the next week or so."
But if the SpamBone is all vaporware, as many allege, this could be the best news yet for the spam-weary masses: Wallace has said that the project is his last-ditch effort to stay in the spam biz.
"We've had a couple of clients already sign on with us contractually and a couple others on the sidelines, waiting to see what happens," Wallace said. "If it doesn't work, then I'm done."
Cross your fingers, everyone.
