Comments:

Re: CAN-SPAM Act Rulemaking, Project No. R411008 To the Commissioners, Thank you for your contined work on addressing the spam situation. I have concerns about No. R411008, particularly with the proposed suppression lists: I think this is an unnecessary and unreasonable burden to place on legitimate merchants who offer and deliver pulishing, newsletter or alert services and they should be exempted from this requirement. I am referring to all subscription based services where the consumer has opted in as a subscriber. The consumer took the time and effort to opt-in to receive the service. The opt-out information is included in the emailed publications and they should be required to use that opt-out service. The publisher should not be required to check a suppression list each and every time they send out their publication. They are only sending to consumers who requested their material. If they misrepresented their publication, we have plenty of law on the books for fraud and misrepresentation. The publisher should not be punished or held responsible for including information or advertising material that the subscriber has placed on a suppression list. Nor should the publisher of a subscription based service be required to monitor this. The consumer already has simple opt out services available to them. This is not unsolicited material. It is subscriber based and should not be included in any spam type of definition. I am quite certain that these publishers are not who CAN-SPAM was designed for, but this suppression list requirement as it stands will likely affect them if it is not made clear that there are subscriber based services that cannot and should not be included. I strongly urge you to consider separating subscription based services from all spam definitions and from any requirement to check a suppression list. You open the door to allowing criminally inclined consumers who simply want to harm merchants by using laws that can be too inclusive. I am talking about the consumers who have made a hash out of worker's compensation in California by making outrageous claims, and taking advantage of the weakness of the California worker's comp system to milk the system for dollars they should never have been eligible for. They will do exactly the same on this. These same individuals are always looking for freebies. So they sign up for the freebie and in doing so agree to receive mail. They take the freebie and then they complain when they get the mail. Why should we protect these freeloaders? Frankly, I do not see how a suppression list will address spam. I almost never get spam from legitimate companies. Almost all of it arrives with fake email addresses, temporary order forms, and misleading subject lines. The removes in the email do not work. I received 50 such emails today. These outfits will not and will never pay any attention to a suppression list. They harvest emails and they use temporary services, probably using servers based outside of the U.S.A. So really, you are only affecting legitimate businesses with this and they are not the problem anyway. They are more than willing to remove consumers from their list and it is VERY easy to remove yourself from their list. This is particularly true of subscription based services such as newsletters, new product alerts, and publications that offer information about new products and services. People do subscribe to and they do want them. And the publishers do care for their lists without any pressure from the law to do so anyway. Respectfully, Sharlee Plett California, USA