Comments:

Dear Legislators; The government will never succeed in curbing spam through the enactment of laws. The spammers are way ahead of everyone else in the technologies they utilize. Most offenders use mail servers located outside the US, they forge headers, making innocent people appear to be the offenders, when in reality, they are not, resulting in honest, ethical people losing their livelihood. I am an Internet publisher who has elected to utilize a new non-email technology to reach my readers, but not everyone is aware of this option. Why? The only way to reach these individuals is through email, and we can all lose our businesses and hard work in building them, simply by trying to make them aware of this new technology. The laws proposed and in place hurt not the bulk mailers of the world, but the honest people attempting to make a living on the Internet. I am one of those people. People also need to take responsibility for the spam in their inboxes. Too many people get online, fill out every form they run across, and when they receive the email they asked for, they hit a spam button rather than the opt-out link provided. I feel that the large ISPs like AOL and Yahoo have provided this spam button in an effort to take control of commercial email for their own profit, not consumer protection. The way things are set up now, there is no due process, and everyone is considered guilty without inquest. That is not fair. I have been a victim of email forgery more times than I can count. If you want to curb spam, then someone must come up with a way to prevent spammers from forging email headers to conceals their true identiies. Spammers are sitting back and laughing at governmental attemps to shut them down, because they know it will never happen. I beleive the government should not be looking to legislate email, but rather they should be concentrating their efforts to catch the scam artists on the web, that are stealing money from consumers via fraudulent claims. I happen to know of a scam artist that has effectively relieved many people of their life savings, yet the legal system has no interest in helping these people get their mony back. His name is Dave Turner www.Dave-Turner.com . Focus on these criminals. Spam will always exist, no matter how many laws are enacted to stop it. Commercial email is not the problem, the forgery of email headers and addresses, now that's the problem. Honest advertisers do not send viruses, trojans or pornography. However, the criminals that do, forge our information to make it appear as though we are. Every time I send a porn spam letter to Yahoo's Abuse Dept, they respond to me, that the email did not originate from Yahoo, that the header was forged. So what does that tell you? A do not mail registry will never work. It is totally impractial. It doesn't stop people on the list from signing up to receive information in the first place. Why are you trying to treat junk email any differently than junk postal mail anyway? I don't see anyone shutting down AOL for sending me disks in the mail that I never asked for. Rather than listening to the newbies that cry spam, you should be working with the business owners on what they see as the problem. We are the Internet experts. We know what is really going on behind the scenes, and we are the ones that have the possible solutions to the problems. We do business online, you legislators do not. for more info, please read my blog: http://www.ezines1.com/triizine