Comments:

To: The Federal Trade Commission Re: CAN-SPAM Act Rulemaking, Project No. R411008 After reviewing the new proposals for the "suppression lists" idea the commission has, I felt the need to express my discomfort with the implementation of any such strategy. This idea as I see it creates more problems than it solves. 1) How can we really verify the intent of an unsubscribe request? Does the person never want to recieve email again from an advertiser after unsubscribing or was there another reason? In my experience there are many other reasons. 2) Email publishers often send mail daily or several times a week. If a subscriber unsubscribe, how are we to know which message caused them to want to unsubscribe? 3) What if the from address of the unsubscribe request did not actually come from the sender and was spoofed for a variety of reason? We would then be adding someone to a list they do not want to be added to, thus invading their privacy and freedom. 4) What about the technical challenges of implementing such a rule? Most small publishers will be put out of business due to this and medium and large publishers will struggle and need to begin raising prices to offset rising technology costs. In addition, for larger merchants whose suppression lists will be very large could even an impossible size to expect publishers to be able to process against their list. 5) A merchant could potentially be sued on erroneous charges because quite simply an email was sent before the unsubscribe request was processed and for whatever reason was delayed. 6) Lastly, will this act not invade the privacy of consumers by requiring merchants to give out their unsubsribe lists? Spammers will simply go around acquiring these unsubscribe lists from merchants for the sole purpose of using them to spam people. I hope these points shed some light on the not just potential, but inevitable flaws of such a rule as the suppression lists. Please do not pass such a rule. Sincerly, Charles Garis Jr