The Australian Communications Authority (ACA) alleges Wayne Mansfield and his company, Clarity 1, sent at least 56 million commercial e-mails in the 12 months after the Spam Act was enacted in April 2004.
Most of these were unsolicited spam, claims the ACA.
The regulator also claims the Perth-based company "harvested" e-mail addresses for spamming purposes, and used a network of servers around the world to send the e-mails.
The ACA has appealed for an interim injunction against Clarity 1 before the court hearing in Perth on July 20.
An ACA spokesperson told ZDNet Australia Mansfield had received several warnings before it raided his company premises in April.
This is not the first time Mansfield has been accused of spamming. In 2002, he unsuccessfully tried to sue antispam activist Joey McNicol after the latter published the IP addresses of T3 Direct, a company that Mansfield owned.
Mansfield claimed that McNicol's actions resulted in a blacklist of his online marketing operations.
The Spam Act carries penalties of up to AU$220,000 per day for first-time corporate offenders and up to AU$1.1 million per day for repeat offenders.
Let's hope the ACA win this, because if they don't, the Act might as well not exist.
Looking at my log files, Mr Mansfield and relate companies have *not* gathered any new email addresses that have been posted to my companies website since the spam act was in place.
Will be interesting to see if the collection of email addresses is retrospectively covered by the Act.
I know the email addresses of the company I work for that he has got he did not get any permission to use explicitly.