Comments:

While I heartily applaud your efforts to curb the problem ofunsolicited bulk email, I am very concerned aboutthe proposed requirement for merchants to maintainsuppression lists.This requirement can have a great deal on economic impact on the merchants who maintain mailing lists, as well as the consumers who have subscribed to them. If I knew that every mailing list I subscribed to was required to keep my email address, even after I unsubscribed, I would never sign up for any lists. As a consumer and an on-line merchant and web developer, this requirement imposes a severe penalty on the publisher, in terms of record keeping, and on the consumer, in terms of privacy in that my email address would potentially be transmitted to sites I never heard of and have no wish to hear of. Thus, these suppression lists could easily lead to more spam instead of less.In addition, given the frequency with which the average consumer changes their ISP, these lists would become compendia of dead email addresses therby becoming only a waste of the precious resources of small companies.Please keep in mind that the average internet-based business is run by a single person and thus has extremely limited resources. This is not a fruitful way to use those scarce resources.Legitimate publishers are not the intended target of the CAN-SPAM act, but this requirement will very likely put many of these legitimate, well intentioned entrepreneurs out of business.I was quite surprised at the potential problems thisruling could involve, and urge you in the strongestpossible terms to reconsider its implementation in lightof these problems,