Fargo- A businessman known in Fargo for his imposing yellow Hummer once drove the largest porn spam operation on the Internet, according to a volunteer activist who said he chronicled the abuse on his Web site.

A lawsuit filed for John Doe Friday in Cass County District Court suggests the accused spammer, Jerry Reynolds, is now suing the author of the Web site, which was partly devoted to exposing Reynolds’ online activity in the mid- to late-90s.

“As far as I know, he was at his peak the worst spammer on the Internet, and I think it was almost all porn,” said Ed Falk, a 46-year-old computer programmer from Mountain View, Calif., in a telephone interview.

Reynolds, reached in his office at 4614 Amber Valley Parkway, refused Tuesday to speak about Falk’s allegations or the lawsuit.

Falk, who is named as the defendant in the lawsuit, said he tracked Reynolds while working from his home as a volunteer anti-spam activist.

The plaintiff, named only as John Doe to protect the man’s reputation, accuses Falk’s Web site of defamation, invasion of privacy and intentional interference with a business, among other damages.

Doe’s attorney, Christopher Harristhal of Minneapolis, would not comment on the man’s identity or discuss the case. The complaint says Doe denies any connection to the activities accused by Falk.

A connection between Doe and Reynolds was found by cross-checking allegations in Harristhal’s 11-page complaint with Falk’s Web site, www.rahul.net/falk .

In one instance, the complaint says the plaintiff twice demanded, in writing, the retraction of offending material from the site. The complaint said one letter was dated Aug. 25, 2004.

On his Web site, Falk has posted a letter dated Aug. 25, 2004, from Harristhal’s law firm on behalf of Jerry Reynolds. The letter, which threatens legal action if the Web site doesn’t change, said Reynolds believes the site is misleading and is damaging his business and reputation.

Falk said he learned of Reynolds during the anti-spam campaign of the mid-1990s.

At the time, Falk was an avid participant in what is known as Usenet, a popular computer network that allows users to congregate and communicate under thousands of different topics, or newsgroups.

Beginning in the ’80s and into the early ’90s, Falk said, Usenet was one of the greatest resources in the world. Then spam arrived in 1994.

The unsolicited messages, sent by the thousands from marketers and proselytizers, flooded the newsgroups, crowding out real users and making genuine discussion nearly impossible, Falk said.

For a couple of years, Falk joined other Usenet volunteers in trying to track and stop the most egregious spammers, either by blocking the messages or by getting Internet service providers to cancel their service to them.

One like-minded activist was David Ritz of Milwaukee. In 1996 he began investigating spam showing up on a porn site called sexzilla.com, which Ritz said was posting tens of thousands of messages daily to Usenet groups on the Internet.

Queries by Ritz into the sexzilla domain name reported its administrative and technical contact as “Jerry, Reynolds” and showed a Fargo post office box for the parent company, Intel Telecom Corp., according to an archived record from Ritz’s 1997 search that Falk keeps on his Web site.

Ritz said he spent up to 12 hours a day trying to trace spam from sexzilla to its source.

“In my mind, there was no question that Jerry Reynolds was sexzilla.com,” he said.

Still, Reynolds has always denied any connection to the Web site, Ritz said. The complaint from John Doe against Falk also says the plaintiff never had any ownership or interest in the site.

Ritz said other record searches show Reynolds had help from employees or partners in the operation. At one point, Ritz estimated 20 percent to 25 percent of all Usenet spam came from the group.

Robert Braver, an anti-spam activist in Norman, Okla., said it was commonly known on Usenet that Reynolds was behind the spam machine.

“I don’t think it was any big secret,” he said.

Falk and Ritz said they don’t know how lucrative sexzilla.com was or how involved Reynolds might have been with the porn site outside of the spam operation. The site is no longer registered to Reynolds, and Ritz said he believes Reynolds left the spamming business in the late ’90s.

Falk said he has double-checked his Web site and is confident the information there regarding Reynolds is accurate. He said the first known spam endeavor by the Fargo man came in May 1996 with a money-making pyramid scheme.

John Doe’s complaint maintains he has never been involved with a pyramid scam. The lawsuit seeks an undetermined amount of money for damages and an injunction against Falk’s site.

An August 2003 article in The Forum featured Reynolds, then 33, in an article about local Hummer owners. The article referred to Reynolds’ Web site, www.yellowh2.com , detailing custom changes to his $54,000 H2 Hummer.

In 2004, Reynolds shipped the Hummer and his Dodge Hennessey Venom 650R Viper to Europe for a continent-wide race called the Gumball Rally 3000, the Associated Press reported. The AP said Reynolds raced as “Tork,” a half-human, half-machine character whose life story is chronicled on the Web at www.torquenstein.net .