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For a limited time, VirtualMDA will give you $5 just for signing up, and for every CPU hour your PC dedicates to sending out marketing emails you'll get another $1.

Sounds too bad to be true? It isn't.

Brian Haberstroh of Sendmails Corporation - the company behind VirtualMDA - told us that VirtualMDA is absolutely above board about the way it operates. 'We require our customers (the marketing companies) to provide us with permission based (opt-in) emails and our delivery system is 100 per cent CAN-SPAM-compliant. Furthermore, we do not allow our customers to send marketing campaigns which could be considered offensive or inappropriate for children.'

There has been much talk in the antivirus community of spammers using computers infected with viruses to send spam by proxy, thus avoiding problems with their IPs being blacklisted by spreading the 'load'. But VirtualMDA will pay you to let it use your computer in this

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way, although of course you run the risk of being thrown off your ISP yourself, or having your IP blacklisted if you are deemed a spammer. And if the mail you relay does violate antispam legislation, then you might potentially be held liable, according Paul Wood, Principle Information Security Analyst at MessageLabs.

'It sounds like a recipe to seriously annoy ISPs... and could potentially compromise their terms and conditions for sending spam. I'm not sure how the legal liability rests with the relay agent, but if they have granted permission to use their computer, then I would imagine they are equally culpable,' he warned.

Haberstroh said: 'We have one ISP in the US that has politely requested we do not allow their users to download the application. It is not our responsibility to comply with the request, but have out of good faith.'

Steve Linford of Spamhaus - an antispam organisation - told us: 'We know this company well, they (aka 'Atriks', aka Brian Haberstroh) are on our ROKSO register.' The ROKSO register (register of known spammers) lists in the articles on Haberstroh's activities evidence of a back door component present in the VirtualDMA client software.

Haberstroh responded: 'We suspect the folks at Spamhaus of infecting a copy themselves in their attempts of tortuous interference with our company. Any and all downloads from our site are not infected with any virus.'

Antispam company Brightmail estimates spam accounts for 63 percent of all Internet email as of March 2004.