Comments:

Re: CAN-SPAM Act Rulemaking, Project No. R411008 To the Commissioners, Almost everyone wants to get rid of SPAM, and I appreciate all you are doing to free us from this awful stuff. I am concerned about one facet of the current approach that threatens to not only limit the SPAM (which is desirable) but also remove a key channel of communications that I find very rewarding and instructive, and that is the requirement for sellers to maintain suppression lists. Under the suppression list scenario, every product developer would have to maintain a list of people they cannot ever contact about their products. Additionally, every affiliate would have to have the capability to check that list before they could ever include an ad in their ezine. As dynamic as the internet is for ezines, subscribers are added and dropped (ie opt-in and opt-out) everyday, and the list is ever-changing. So, consider a publisher who has spent several days authoring content and arranging promotions that perectly match the articles. on the very evening of publication, a new subscriber signs up for the ezine who has filed a suppression order for one of the products in the ezine about to be published. What is the author to do in this case ? Do they have to check the suppression list the moment before they press send, compare thier list of thousands of subscribers with the names on the suppression list to make sure no violations occur, or delay publication to look for an alternate ad that fits their article content and has never been suppressed by any of the subscribers ? This is madness, and will cause such chaos to a publisher that he or she will likely do one of the following to maintain some kind of order as a publisher: (1) refuse to promote any product that has ever been suppressed by anyone (2) refuse to accept subscribers who are found to be on any suppression list (thereby preserving the rights of the thousands to receive the ezine) (3) quit publishing the ezine or newsletter Another scenario to consider is the potential that one competitor will sign up to another's ezine and file a suppression of that publisher's product. This would effectively shut down the competitor from doing any ezine or newsletter promotion of their products, and consequently the ezine publishers would go out of the ezine business. Any of these are undesirable side effects of the suppression list applied to opt-in email publications. The way the suppression list is being discussed, it would place an onerous burden on the informal networks of authors and affiliates who provide such value to me in their ezines and newsletters which I have opted to receive by signing up to be on their lists, that many or most of them would cease to publish at all. Please reconsider very carefully the impact of this suppression list concept and its required implementation for subscription-based, opt-in ezines and newsletters that are published by email. I wish to continue to receive the subscription-based email publications I value. I wish to keep the privacy I currently enjoy as a subscriber. And I wish to preserve the freedom to publish someday myself if I wish. Respectfully, Edward Yodis