Comments:

Overall, the proposed Do-Not-E-mail Registry would unfairly penalize legitimate marketers in an attempt to regulate businesses that do not comply with the provisions of the CAN SPAM Act, and the burden on marketers would outweigh the benefit of enacting the Registry. As a legitimate marketer, our e-mail lists are permission-based, and every promotional communication offers a functional unsubscribe to ensure that those who want to be removed from our list are removed. We incur expenses and have established procedures to ensure that our lists are scrubbed and our e-mails are mailed only to those who want to receive them. With a Do-Not-E-mail Registry, we would be forced to set up unnecessary administrative procedures in order to scrub our lists against the Registry when we are already scrubbing them for permission. Violators of the CAN SPAM Act are not currently using permission-based lists, or established list hygiene procedures. Enacting the Registry, in addition to the CAN SPAM Act, does not ensure that the violators will begin to follow legitimate procedures. The Registry only adds burdensome additional costs for legitimate marketers and may have minimal effect on spammers. The Do-Not-Email Registry could also create unintended consequences for customers who sign up for the Registry intending to stop "spam", but who want to continue to receive our communications for which they enrolled. Part of the appeal of the Web is the ability to easily forward information to a broad audience of the user’s choice. Recognizing this, many legitimate companies offer a “forward to a friend” feature on their site. Encumbering this activity with the onerous task of first matching against a Do-Not-E-Mail Registry seems beyond the spirit of the Act.