Spammer Gets Nine Years of Hard Time
“Jeremy Jaynes of North Carolina has been sentenced to nine years for spamming AOL users with millions of unsolicited email ads. Judge Thomas Horne has postponed the jail term due to potential constitutional issues of the new anti-spamming law.”
It reminds me of the joke: What do you call 10,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start.
A spammer gets hard time. Sweet!
The fine print reads thusly: The sentence is on hold until the anti-spamming law is tested constitutionally.
In other words, we�re back to those 10,000 lawyers.
I would like to think that lawyers as a whole would realize what a problem spam is, and what scumbags spammers are. But alas, everyone has lawyers willing to try to get their cases tossed, even child molesters.
I run a web hosting service, and I have long featured email addresses as part of the package. I am phasing them out and offering my clients Gmail addresses instead. Why? Because of the quantity of spam that I receive. My web server spends more time processing and killing spam than it does serving up websites. I�m eventually going to turn sendmail off completely.
Imagine that. If I�m dumping email as a service because of spam, no doubt others are doing so as well. A beneficial protocol dropped, because of massive abuse by criminals.
Is nine years in the can too heavy a sentence for someone whose crime was the sending of hundreds of millions of worthless, unsolicited email messages?
This offender was personally responsible for over 100,000 complaints from AOL users from just ONE of his spamming operations. He ran several others. And now, anyone thinking about spamming others within the US borders will have something to think about beforehand.
In August, 2004, statistics showed that 42.53% of spam originated in the US. That means that 57.47% came from other countries. That number will no doubt rise as this law is enforced.
But who knows? Maybe this will encourage more and more nations to do the same thing, as some already have.
True, society has far worse problems that unsolicited email. But spam is costing us the free use of the email protocol. That deserves some stern punishment.
