Comments:

Section 5(b) should clearly define using opt-out mechanisms to harvest valid emails as aggravated violations and the purchasing of addresses harvested in this way, even if by entities outside the jurisdiction of the US, as aggravated violations. The “forward-to-a-friend” scenarios are problematic. Regulations should not prohibit forwarding commercial email unless the original sender offers some sort of incentive for doing do. People who forward and email because they think their correspondent might be interested should be definitively protected. The National Do Not Email Registry if implemented in plain text (i.e. a list that a spammer can download and use to spam with) is a particularly bad idea. Such a registry should only be implemented via a challenge mechanism in which emailer submit lists to a site and receive back either cleaned lists or status for each email on the list.