I don't see how anyone could disagree with the Virginia Supreme Court ruling; the law is pretty straightforward that overbroad laws are illegal. They should have been more careful in drafting the statute. What they were trying to do was fine, they just wrote it without exempting protected speech.

You have the right to send out non-commercial speech. But that doesn't mean I have to listen. And if you include commercial speech in that message, your message would be illegal (if they modify the statute to exempt protected speech).

Virginia and other states should adopt the Virginia law modified by this decision.

Fortunately, from the receiver's point of view, you can rid yourself of almost all of this junk. For example, Abaca's spam filter was tested by The Tolly Group and filtered out 99.997% of the spam received, the highest number they've ever seen. That's the good news: the technology IS available and if we can only get everyone to use it, then there wouldn't be a spam problem.

The bad news is that IT departments are slow to adopt effective products like this. For example, it took DeAnza College (22,000 students) over a year to decide to install an Abaca box (they were using Barracuda). Now their spam has virtually disappeared. I think the problem is that the vendor hype has left IT departments tone deaf to vendor pitches. This certainly makes marketing a challenge for those of us with legitimate solutions to the problem.