You might have heard from me before. Not through these august pages, necessarily, but before that. In a past life and indeed a past century - OK, about six years ago - I was one of those repulsive spammers sending out junk mail and clogging up people's inboxes. It seemed a good idea at the time. I'd better explain.

I had this start-up business. I call it that because that's what it was and it never really got any further: Clapperton Publishing Limited. Basically I inherited an existing publication but launched my own - the inelegantly titled SME Business IT Update, later changed to Small Business IT Update at the reasonable request of another publication called SME Business.

The idea was to inform people of things they could do with their IT systems that would save bits of money here and there: things like designing your own letterheads in Word, using your PC as a fax - stuff that might, if you did it all and added it all up, save four figures or so by the end of the year. Not bad for a 60 quid investment in a newsletter, you might think.

At first it went well. The readers who saw it liked it, it gained a couple of mentions in the press and 200 people responded to mailshots sent out in a couple of accounting system companies' newsletters. Which, given that these were basically enclosures within what might already have been regarded as junk mail, might be thought a pretty good result. Except the business plan was predicated on 600 people responding.

Nevertheless it looked good: about 20 people a week were responding so I bought the new computer and a nice plasma screen (quite a luxury at that point) - and the orders stopped. Dead. And all of my marketing ideas depended on at least some small cash flow coming in.

This would be about when I got a piece of spam. From a spammer. Suggesting they could help my business by approaching business owners and managers from this high-quality, regularly-cleaned list they had. For 90 quid.

OK, with hindsight it was crazy. But when you're up against it and convinced you're not going to survive unless you do something drastic, you'll believe anything - and as a start-up you're living and breathing the business to the extent that you think everyone's secretly already convinced by the value of your product (and in my case never mind that they've survived perfectly OK without it so far). You won't let it die, and if you're working by yourself - I wasn't paying myself, let alone employing other people - there's no-one to tell you it's not going to work. Or indeed telling you that the internet was about to throw out a massive amount of free information, making your product look overly costly.

So I went for it. I became that faceless spammer. And I took a lot of their advice - no point in hiring these people if you're not going to take their advice after all. Put "urgent" on the subject or it won't get read, they said, so against my instincts I did so. Don't put a real reply address in, they said, let us take care of that - actually I drew the line there. If people were going to receive mail from me about something I thought worth drawing their attention there was no need to hide.

I think it was when an 11-year-old friend of the family asked me why I'd been sending him entreaties (he used words like that) to subscribe to a newsletter for business owners that I twigged that the quality of the list may conceivably not have been all I'd been led to believe.

I still have no way of knowing how many bona fide managers received my mail; as far as I recall none of them replied. But I made some interesting other contacts. One individual threatened to take me to court: I pointed out that I'd done nothing illegal (which I hadn't, just been incredibly na¿ve) but he had an uncle who worked in the Home OfÞce so wouldn't be persuaded otherwise. I'm still waiting for the writ.

The thing is, I was close enough to my business to be utterly convinced of the value of my offering. Nobody in business should spend more than is needed on their IT and my publication would help them, surely? And there's the problem. For every 10 invitations to increase your bust or willy size a thousandfold, for every assurance that snoring is normal and curable by a simple nasal amputation procedure, there's some poor sap with a genuine business idea that he or she believes, honestly, would be a help to you..

And if that's you, then the thing to do is not to be tempted no matter how bad sales get. If you're down to a record low in your marketing coffers then let's be honest, you have a business problem that's not going to be resolved by a quick spend of marketing anyway - unplanned spending is usually a good way of simply removing cash from your account. Spamming can be tempting and it's appallingly easy to persuade yourself that's not what you're doing - this is you, after all, not some ignoramus sending out obscenities.

Except that's how you'll be perceived. Reputations are easy to damage, embarrassingly so, and it can take a while to recover. And if you ever do something unwise, whatever you do don't draw attention to it - writing an article in the national press raking it all up again is a terrible idea, for example, no matter how nicely your editor asks.

Hey, hang on...