A U.S. court has ordered notorious Montreal spammer Adam Guerbuez to pay Facebook a whopping $873-million in damages for breaking in to the social networking site's email server and bombarding its members with "sleazy" spam emails, Reuters reports.

Mr. Guerbuez was found guilty and fined by U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel of the Northern District of California in San Jose, Calif. Facebook had sued Mr. Guerbuez under the provisions of the cheekily-acronymed U.S. law CAN-SPAM, which stands for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing. Judge Fogel found that Mr. Guerbuez had broken the law by sending emails about sexually oriented topics as well as unsolicited offers to buy drugs and other products to Facebook members.

In a blog post Monday, Facebook security director Max Kelly wrote that the company does not necessarily expect to collect on the record-setting fine, as it is "unlikely that Geurbez and Atlantis Blue Capital could ever honour the judgment rendered against them." Mr. Kelly is confident, however, that the award "represents a powerful deterrent to anyone and everyone who would seek to abuse Facebook and its users."

CNET News has background on the suit:

Facebook noticed an uptick in spam beginning in the spring, with Facebook members receiving messages from friends and other members offering things like herbal marijuana and male enhancement pills for sale, a spokesman said. The messages were coming from Facebook accounts that had been compromised.

Facebook sued under the Can-Spam (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) Act, which bans "false and misleading" marketing e-mails. Although the law was written for e-mails, a judgment in favor of MySpace in May set the precedent for extending the law to messages sent within social networks. In that case, MySpace was awarded $234 million to be paid by so-called Spam King Sanford Wallace and another man.