man was arrested outside his home in Buffalo on Tuesday and charged in state court with forgery and fraud in connection with millions of unsolicited e-mail messages, commonly known as spam, Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney general, said yesterday.

The man, Howard Carmack, 36, pleaded not guilty and was released yesterday on $20,000 bail.

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Last week, Mr. Carmack was ordered to pay $16.4 million to EarthLink, the Internet provider he used to send the spam, after he did not respond to a civil suit the company had brought in federal court in Atlanta.

Mr. Carmack was charged with four felony and two misdemeanor counts, the most serious of which carries a prison sentence of three and a half to seven years. Mr. Carmack previously was convicted of forging postal mail orders, a lawyer involved in the case said.

New York State does not have a law specifically against sending spam. Mr. Carmack was charged with forgery because he replaced his own e-mail return address with those of other people, according to the complaint filed by Mr. Spitzer's office. He was also charged under New York's law against identity theft, which took effect last year, based on accusations that he used stolen credit card numbers to sign up for 343 Internet accounts from EarthLink. The company estimates that Mr. Carmack in the last year sent about 825 million e-mail messages that offered software for use by spammers, lists of e-mail addresses and herbal sexual stimulants.

"Spam itself is not illegal," Mr. Spitzer said. "When it involves forged documentation and identity theft, it clearly is illegal."

Earlier this year, the state was granted a permanent injunction ordering MonsterHut.com, an e-mail company in Niagara Falls, not to send fraudulent messages.

EarthLink had spent the better part of a year trying to track down the person it referred to as the "Buffalo spammer." Last year it filed a suit against an unnamed defendant, referred to as John Doe, in order to gather evidence and identify the actual spammer.

When he was arrested, Mr. Carmack did not have a lawyer. An Erie County public defender, Don Barry, was assigned to assist him. But the judge, Diane Devlin, determined that Mr. Carmack owned his own business and was not entitled to a court-appointed lawyer, Mr. Barry said in a telephone interview yesterday.

A woman answering Mr. Carmack's telephone yesterday afternoon said he was not home and declined to provide further information. His next court date is Monday.