Alan Connor is the inventor and implementor of the final ultimate solution to the spam problem, and everyone who dares claim otherwise is a spammer. That is basically the gist of the messages Alan sometimes spews into NANAE.
Alan Connor is appearently also active on many other newsgroups, including comp.mail.misc.
In reality, Alan's system is known as a challenge-response or C/R system; it auto-answers incoming email with a challenge and only lets the email through if it receives a valid response. There are several problems with this concept, but Alan doesn't want to hear them. In addition, Alan's system isn't even a very good implementation of the C/R concept, as it fails to address the chicken-egg problem that is inherent to C/R: What if your C/R system sends a challenge to an email address that is also protected by a C/R system? Because of this, Alan and Timo Salmi, another C/R advocate, are unable to email eachother. So basically Alan's system is a broken implementation of a flawed concept.
Another inherent flaw to the C/R concept is that the From: address is trivially easy to forge and spammers do so in abundance. Sometimes, by accident or malice, they pick a live email address to forge into their From: headers, causing the owner of that address to be swamped in bounces, angry replies from less clued individuals and, of course, challenges from C/R systems. Alan at first denies this happens, despite the evidence that it does was posted right in his face. Recently however, he claims that he deploys a spam filter that weeds out 100% of all spam. Why the C/R system is needed if his spam filter is so perfect is one question that still goes unanswered.
It should also be noted that Alan posts with a fake email address in his headers, another thing that would be completely unneeded if his system were truly so perfect as he claims.
Alan also claims that his newsreading software detects and erases every posting that makes fun of him, showing him only the headers. Since his headers indicate that he uses slrn and, as far as anyone knows, slrn does not come standard with that ability, he must have written his own code to perform that miracle. Requests for the source code have, however, gone unanswered.
Alan is also prone to posting the logs from his mailserver in NANAE, claiming that all blocked spam is coming from his opponents. According to Alan, only spammers post to NANAE! :-) (This makes him a spammer by his own definition, since he posts to NANAE...)
"Sam" is Alan's arch nemesis. You see, if you speak out against Alan or claim that C/R is not the final solution, you are a spammer. However, if you do something really nasty, like make fun of Alan, write an Alan Connor FAQ or host said FAQ, you must be an incarnation of Sam. The fact that there is more that one person who thinks he's a raving nut has not yet penetrated Alan's skull.
As far as this author can tell, it's a nickname that was given to Alan by his critics on comp.mail.misc. It probably refers to the cartoon character of MTV fame.
Ah! It seems that Alan Connor is just one alias of a kook who has been making many more outrageous claims on many other newsgroups. One of those claims is that he has seen Bigfoot, and another was that he was kidnapped by Xena, warrior princess. This author does not know if this is true, but Alan's opponents frequently refer to it and Alan himself has not denied it or even addressed the issue.