Comments:

Re: CAN-SPAM Act Rulemaking, Project No. R411008 To the Commissioners, The intent of this legislation and your plans to interpret it are valuable and to be commended. But, let's not allow good intentions to destroy the ability of hundreds of thousands of legitimate business owners to conduct business in a fair and ethical manner. My concern is about the proposed requirement for merchants to maintain suppression lists. I urge you to carefully consider the many problems and costs associated with this idea. Requiring the use of suppression lists will seriously damage many of the legitimate publications available on the net. These are businesses and individuals that are already requiring permission from their subscribers to send these electronic publications. These are NOT the intended target of the CAN-SPAM legislation. There's also the potential for significant harm to consumers, because of the problem of properly knowing their intent when they unsubscribe from a list. Have you also considered the potential that these suppression lists could easily fall into the hands of spammers, leading to more spam instead of less. Spammers will not be deterred by this interpretation, but it could easily put hundreds of thousands of internet-based businesses out-of-business. The biggest problem, as I see it, is that it is completely impractial for a merchant to control ALL the different ways the merchant's products might be discussed in an email message. It's one thing to require a merchant to remove a person from his or her own list,but quite another to require that merchant to be certain the person is removed from any other list that might promote the merchant's product. I urge you in the strongest possible terms to reconsider your intended implementation in light of these problems. Respectfully, Keith Price Spokane, WA