LOUDOUN COUNTY, Va. - The United States' first felony conviction for spamming was upheld Friday by the Virginia Supreme Court.

The spammer, Jeremy Jaynes of Raleigh, N.C, will serve nine years in prison for sending what authorities believe to be millions of messages over a two-month period in 2003. He will serve three years for each of the three Virginia Computer Crimes Act violations for which he was found guilty in 2005.

Jaynes, who made Spamhaus' list of the top 10 spammers, was arrested in 2003, before Congress passed the CAN-SPAM Act. He was convicted in 2005, but his lawyers appealed. The Virginia Supreme Court upheld the conviction by a narrow 4-3 vote.

The prosecution presented evidence of more than 53,000 illegal emails Jaynes sent in three days in July 2003. It is believed that Jaynes sent 10 million messages daily in July and August that year.

Jaynes, a North Carolina resident, was charged in Virginia because the AOL servers he used for sending spam were located in Loudoun County, Va.

In Jaynes' defense, lawyers argued that a provision of the Virginia Computer Crimes Act violates First Amendment rights to "anonymous speech" and the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution.

The court rejected the claims because Jaynes used fake email addresses, which violates the CAN-SPAM Act's requirement that recipients be given a way to contact the sender. The court also said Jaynes' peddling of scam products and services excludes him from First Amendment protection.

Justice Elizabeth Lacy said the court's narrow vote to uphold the conviction may have been due to worries about the dangers of vague anti-spam legislation. In her written dissent, Lacy argued that the "unsolicited bulk electronic mail" provision of Virginia's Computer Crimes Act is "unconstitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk email, including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution."