It’s hard to organize your thoughts about a someone whom you only know from news reports.

So, when my friend Anne posted about Ryan Pitylak’s “conversion” to anti-spammer and asked for my thoughts, I gave as honest of an assessment as I could:

I’m always skeptical about folks like him.
They get slammed by the law and come out talking about how they’re going to save the world from what they were doing.
It just smacks of opportunism.

Eleven days later, I feel pretty much the same way. On one hand, I want to be pretty forgiving about things. It would be nice if the bad guys all became the good guys. On the other hand, the history of bad guys becoming good guys isn’t so stellar.

I guess I’m an old hand at this anti-spam thing. My involvement dates all the way back to the days of Sanford “Spamford” Wallace — the first man to hold the title of “Spam King.” He quit and claimed to have seen the light. Turns out that it was probably just the thought there was coin to be made doing other bad things. Earlier this year, he was hit hard by a federal district court judge over FTC claims that he became a spyware king instead.

Things like that don’t seem to change much.

Pitylak claims that, as a former spammer, companies will find his knowledge of what spammers do to be invaluable. But, he got shutdown last year while this litigation played out. Last year’s spammer tricks aren’t exactly today’s spammer tricks. Now that he’s “out” as an anti-spammer, his access to the latest tricks that spammers are sharing with each other will be limited. Thus, I’m wondering what he has to offer.

Time, of course, will tell. But, color me skeptical.