Across the Internet a muffled cheer rises to greet the news of a spammer sentenced to a nine-year prison term for sending junk mail to AOL customers in the Virginia-prosecuted case against brother and sister spammers, Jeremy D. Jaynes and Jessica DeGroot. A third defendant, Richard Rutkowski, was found not guilty.

Lauding the prosecution under what is currently the toughest spam law in the nation, Attny. General Jerry Kilgore called it a “major victory for Virginians and Americans.” Jeremy Jaynes was given the dubious title of the world’s eighth most prolific spammer by the Register of Known Spam Operators. The case gave a whole new twist to the phrase “spam while you sleep”, as the indictment alleged that spam was sent between July 11, 2003 and August 9, 2003 through Virginia-based servers, and spam sent on July 16, 19, and 26 exceeded 10,000 messages during each 24-hour period. Those numbers do not even represent the total number of messages sent, as they were based solely on actual complaints received by ISPs from their customers. The defendants also falsified transmission and router information to prevent recipients from identifying who sent the messages and contacting the sender.

While this spam case is a victory in Virginia, is it really a major victory or is it more like donning an umbrella for protection during a tidal wave? If you want to get a graphic picture of the tidal wave, take a look at upper-left hand box of the AOL corporate Web site, which details their spam activity for a day. For instance just on one day, November 4, by 6 p.m., AOL had blocked 980,023,061 spam e-mails and for the month the number rose to over 5 billion. Imagine stopping that spam, one case at a time.