By CHELYEN DAVIS
RICHMOND--The Virginia Court of Appeals yesterday upheld the nation's first conviction under an anti-spam law.
The court rejected an appeal by Jeremy Jaynes, who was convicted in 2004 in Loudoun County of violating Virginia's anti-spam law, the nation's most restrictive law against Internet spam e-mails.
Jaynes, a North Carolina resident who was considered the eighth worst spammer in the world by Spamhaus, a spammer monitoring group, was accused of hiding and falsifying routing and domain information to send hundreds of thousands of unwanted e-mails.
Virginia's law allows for the sending of unsolicited bulk e-mail, but makes it a crime for senders to hide their identities if they're sending more than 10,000 pieces of e-mail in a single 24-hour period, or 100,000 in a 30-day period.
Evidence from his original trial showed that Jaynes had sent more than 12,000 unsolicited e-mails on a single day in July 2003--right after Virginia's law took effect--and more than that on two other days that month. He had also gone to lengths to hide the origin of those e-mails.
