Comments:

Re: CAN-SPAM Act Rulemaking, Project No. R411008 To the Commissioners, I appreciate the commissions review of anti-spam laws for bulk email, however I do not support your proposed requirement for merchants to maintain suppression lists. There are a large quantity of honest businesses who utilise the internet daily for their marketing and despite including all relevant legal text and procedures to ensure they are not spamming people - your new regulations would still cause extreme financial disadvantage to both the merchants and their consumers. I feel that this has not be thought through enough and what you are introducing will produce more problems than benefits. I run many legitimate newsletter services and direct marketing services for my clients as a web developer. However what you are proposing would make it extremely difficult to continue such services and in affect you would be closing down legitimate honest businesses overnight. I already follow double opt-in processes for all mailing lists and contain all statutory information on emails and associated pages for the opt-in processes. I have a help section on all client sites to ensure subscribers can understand how to remove themselves and how their information is kept securely. My specific concern is for harm to businesses and publishers who require permission from the consumer prior to adding them to any list. Such entities are not what CAN-SPAM was designed for and should be clearly excluded from this requirement. As you've probably heard before, having a database of suppression lists will be adding to the potential for hijacking and illegal use as further spam. This would therefore do the opposite effect to the purpose of CAN-SPAM. The costs and complexities of setting this up properly and educating consumers would be significant and too extensive for each business owner to bear. I was quite surprised at the potential problems this ruling could involve, and urge you in the strongest possible terms to reconsider its implementation in light of these problems, Respectfully, Anita Terese Victoria, Australia