Comments:

I first want to say that I think that the legislation is heading in the correct direction. However, I work with a number of small Internet-based businesses and I can say that implementing suppression lists would be catastrophic in many cases. I have been monitoring email removes more in-depth since the passing of the CAN-SPAM legislation and I see so many legitimate emails which are transactional (ie order notices/receipts, product download information, etc) being marked as spam that implementing suppression lists will simply cause more problems and a larger customer service burden on the small business than what good it will do. I have done ample research on spam in my time and even the most expert sources indicate that about 95% of all spam can be related back to a dozen or so main sources. With this in mind it seems clear that, to maintain email as a viable source of communication, we must concentrate our efforts on stopping this small group of violators. This may mean creating a task force which will be dedicated to tracking down sites responsible for sending larger unsolicited campaigns and leveraging them, with the threat of heavy fines, to get back to the actual service initiating the mail, and shutting them down. I sometimes liken spam to the drug trade, in that there are millions of dealers, but very few people who are actually the "brains" behind the operation. The ability is there to cut this off at the source and by not taking action on this immediately, with greater force than the CAN-SPAM act alone, spam will continue to grow as an epidemic. Sincerely, Brent Paine StartOfTheWeb.com *REDACTED PERSONAL INFORMATION*