No, they're not getting $16.4M for being purveyors of fine spam. Instead, they have received a judgment in that amount from Howard Carmack (no relation to the games developer) from Buffalo, NY who reportedly sent (with his "ring" of spammers) some 825 million pieces of spam using EarthLink's networks.

According to this article from the San Francisco Chronicle (which contains a bunch of other good spam lawsuit information), Mr. Carmack has also been enjoined from sending spam or helping others to do the same.