It doesn’t really matter who you are, where you live, or how much money you make, anyone who has an email account and uses the internet has had to deal with spam. The U.S. government enacted legislation to help curb unsolicited bulk email and have both fined and imprisoned spammers when caught.

MySpace won a landmark judgment today against Sanford Wallace and his partner, Walter Rines. A federal judge handed down a $234 million judgment to the pair after they failed to show up for a court hearing.

So prolific a spammer was Wallace that he was dubbed Spamford and Spam King due to the company he headed up in the 1990’s that is reported to have sent as many as 30 million junk emails on a daily basis.

MySpace filed suit against Wallace and Rines after it found that the pair used false accounts and accounts accessed by stealing passwords to send 735,925 unsolicited emails to MySpace users posing as friends. Each of the unsolicited messages can have a fine of $3 when conducted knowingly and willfully.

When the users clicked on the links in the messages sent from the pair, users were taken to websites where Wallace and Rines made money selling ring tones, goods or simply from the web traffic to the links.

MySpace chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam told the AP, “MySpace has zero tolerance for those who attempt to act illegally on our site. We remain committed to punishing those who violate the law and try to harm our members."

No one really expects MySpace to collect on the massive judgment levied against the pair of spammers. However, MySpace hopes that the landmark judgment will help to deter other spammers from harassing MySpace members.

John Levine of the anti-spam advocacy group Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email is quoted by the AP saying, "The giant judgments are all defaults, which means they don't necessarily even know how to find the spammer."

DailyTech first reported the MySpace suit against Wallace and Rines in January of 2007.