Following a ruling from a Virginia court in November, Jeremy Jaynes, a prolific spammer (number 8 on Spamhaus’s list), is appealing a ruling that imposed a 9-year sentence, holding up the process. The reason for the delay is Jaynes, actually a North Carolina resident, is being charged in Virginia, since the majority of the servers he used to distribute his spam were in Virginia, so a judge has delayed the start of his sentence.

Jaynes was making as much as $750,000 a month from his spamming business, and netted a hefty fortune of almost 24 million dollars from spamming.

Jaynes used techniques to falsify routing information as well as the source of the messages, which meant that receivers could never request that they be removed from the mailing list, which is a crime now under Virginia state law. The government has decided to make an example of this spammer, which will hopefully
lead other governments in the world into cracking down on these “email-marketers”. While many good spam filters are available, there is more to spam than it just showing up in your inbox to sort through. The behind the scenes issue with spam, is the fact that 70% of mail is believed to be spam right now, which is a huge cost in overall internet bandwidth as well as internal network services. Spam costs businesses millions of dollars a year, as well as wasting millions of our minutes.