Comments:

Re: CAN-SPAM Act Rulemaking, Project No. R411008 To the Commissioners, I am a consumer and a businessman and use email for those purposes as well as personal communication. I appreciate your efforts to assist the problem of unsolicited email. However, I am concerned about the proposed requirement for merchants to maintain suppression lists. Normal business contact and relationship online has just about been halted by the binds of spam regulations. I'm afraid supression lists would all but shutdown way too many normal hard working legitimate people. I personally cannot even contact some of my own paid members because their domain blocks mine from sending any mail at all. I've lost a webhost because one person put our domain link in an email they mailed out and as a result we got the spam complaint and we got kicked offline by our host. We have trouble using email in general because everyone is so unclear on what CAN-SPAM is that people are reporting normal email as spam, and others quit using email alltogether or block it all. It's been a most frustrating experience to run a normal online business since these strange regulations came about. And just where is the CAN-bulk postal mail regulations? I seem to get way more of that on a daily basis than I do in my normal email. Blanket regulation is poor policy and does nothing to stop the real criminals sending harmfull bulk email. They are using required unsubcribe links to confirm address' putting your further on millions of lists. Half the time I'm afraid to unsubscribe simply because of this reason. The fact is these rulings and requirements do nothing to stop the real bulk mail and instead they clamp down on the operations of normal online business. For example, there are legitimate publications online that bring together large groups of like minded people on all sorts of topics. These people want to know about products in certain fields and want to learn information on their specific interest. Yet the publishers must rely on email to provide this information and resources, and they must advertise to attract the people that are interested but cannot as they further become crippled by regulation and fears of SPAM prosecution. I strongly feel these suppression lists will do more to harm regular business and consumers while futher complicating a regulation that has already done harm. Because of the laws already it only took one email to shut down my business entirely with an email I didn't even send. Competitors can ruin each other by launching numerous false spam complaints, it's simply disasterous to people like me. I just hope each day someone doesn't realize this is a possibility and try it. Pehaps keeping the unsubcribed system but also requiring everyone to register a seperate type of email address for business and having email providers setup an option for to be able to filter emails from these newly registered email types could help? That way their is another form of identification to sort out real bulk mailers from regular business mailers. I don't know the solution for sure but the rules added to more rules seem to be making the problem more compicated and creating all types of new little problems. It's like punishing the whole class when it's one person acting up and I don't like my government to operate that way. Sincerely, Ross Carrel St. Petersburg, FL