Spammer Going to Jail

A Virginian court has just sentenced Jeremy Jayne to nine years behind bars for sending unwanted emails.

It's been estimated that he sent up to 10,000,000 messages daily and may have profited nearly $750k per month doing so. He was found guilty of violating a new Virginian law making it illegal to fake or "spoof" an email address when sending messages.

A large portion of spam is sent from falsified addresses in order to fool recipients when attempting to complain to the spammer's ISP. Jaynes also is accused of hijacking email servers owned by AOL in order to send spam. Doing so is already well established as committing theft of services.

This legal action does not appear to be related to the CAN-SPAM act. Most studies indicate the act has not has a measurable impact on the spam message problem.

Virginia's own strict anti-spam laws were already in effect when CAN-SPAM was passed. There was much speculation as to if CAN-SPAM would invalidate those laws. This conviction would appear to confirm that they are still in place.

Instead of waiting for legal action, end-users may want to install spam filter software on their PC's to help minimize the impact of unwanted email. This site offers a free trial download of such a product.

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