BOSTON -- An angry NASCAR fan who flooded Fox Entertainment with e-mails after a Boston Red Sox game pre-empted an auto race has been sentenced to six months of home detention.

Michael Melo, 45, of Billerica, paid $36,000 in restitution before his sentencing and also will have to pay a $2,000 fine.

He pleaded guilty in May to a federal misdemeanor charge of damage to a protected computer system. He admitted he wrote a computer program that fired off more than a half-million e-mail messages to WFXT-TV 25 in Boston after a Red Sox game was aired instead of a NASCAR race in 2001.

The e-mail messages were automatically forwarded to Fox-25's Los Angeles parent company, Fox Entertainment. The network, thinking it was a hacker attack, shut down Internet communications with the affiliate and was forced to spend about $36,000 to clean up the site.