The Virginia Supreme Court on Friday decided that the state's anti-spam law is unconstitutional. The Court announced that the 2003 Virginia spam law didn't distinguish between commercial e-mails and those with political messages, and thus was an overly broad prohibition on free speech protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Therefore the conviction of a man who was once considered to be one of the most notorious spammers was canceled. Jeremy Jaynes is now a free man. The spammer was previously convicted as the first felony spammer in the country in a 2004 trial. A year later he had been sentenced to nine years. But action under the Can-Spam Act may be unlikely; it wasn't signed until December 2003, when Jaynes was already being arrested.

The Virginia law "is unconstitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mails, including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution," Justice G. Steven Agee wrote.

In other words the state Supreme Court said the law didn't make any distinction between types of e-mail. However sending commercial spam is still illegal in Virginia under the federal Can-Spam Act. It’s not Jaynes’ case because the law was adopted after he sent the e-mails that were the basis for the state charges. Virginia's anti-spam law made it a felony to send unsolicited bulk e-mail by using a false domain name or Internet protocol address. Sending mails to more than 10,000 recipients in a 24-hour period is also a felony.