Comments:

Re: CAN-SPAM Act Rulemaking, Project No. R411008 To the Commissioners, I applaud your efforts to curb the problem of unsolicited bulk email. However, I have two concerns. First the real spam offenders are indifferent to the sensibilities that good businesses take to heart. For instance - a good business person knows that their relationship with their customer is their most valuable asset. Therefor they have every incentive to treat their customer with respect - which includes the opt-in and opt-out courtesies that we have all grown accustomed to. Therefor, the spam problem is one that can be controlled merely by putting the power to accept or reject rougue emails in the hands of the recipient. What you may consider spam, I may consider information - it is for me to decide and no one else. For myself there are already plenty of free solutions that I employ successfully. In addition, it appears that with a little tinkering with the technology, email from rogue mailers like harvesters can be virtually eliminated. I would much prefer a market solution to a regulatory solution. Secondly, I am concerned about the proposed requirement for merchants to maintain suppression lists. This is both cumbersom and silly. It seems to me to be an unneccesary burden when a simple opt-out is effective with the "good guys". Any system that adds to the costs of people I trust - has missed its mark. In my experience there is a difference between spammers and commercial enterprises. While a commercial enterprise might send me an unsolicited email - they rarely intend to and are generally very responsive to my complaints - because their legitimate enterprise is building relationships, not sending email. Whereas a spammers business is profiting from unsolicited email to people they have no relationship with. Surpression lists do not address this distinction. The email I get from spammers is 99.999% of all of the unsolicited email that I get - even though I get the rare unsolicited email from a legitimate online business. I would never require that business to maintain a surpression list. My ability to filter out spam and block unsolicited email is sufficient. If that were improved upon I'd be even happier. As regards surpression lists - there are so many problems and costs associated with this idea, and so much damage done to consumers and businesses alike, that I feel I must urge you to consider this matter most carefully. Requirement of the use of suppression lists will seriously damage many of the legitimate publications available on the net. My specific concern is for harm to publishers who require permission from the consumer prior to adding them to any list. They're not who CAN-SPAM was designed to put out of business, but this requirement will very likely have that effect. 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. On top of that, these suppression lists could easily fall into the hands of spammers, leading to more spam instead of less. 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, Neil Fryer Oregon USA