Comments:

Re.: CAN-SPAM Act Rulemaking, Project No. R411008 A. Criteria for Determining Whether ``The Primary Purpose'' of an Electronic Mail Message is Commercial What will happen in the cases where I, as a newsletter publisher, primarily send newsletters of informational character with no advertising at all, but occasionally send "stand-alone" issues that promote specific products or services. Will the single mailing that is clearly of commercial character be the only mailing covered byt the act? Will all my mailings be considered commercial because I occationally send out product recommendations? B. Modifying What Is a ``Transactional or Relationship Message'' 8. Email messages that deliver goods or services Could an informational newsletter be seen as a "service"? E. Issuing Regulations Implementing the Act 1. Section 3(16) of the Act defines when a person is a ``sender'' of commercial e-mail If I send out my weekly newsletter and include different 3rd party advertising from week to week how am I supposed to determine which 3rd party advertisers where "senders" in a mailing that caused one of my subscribers to unsubscribe? Sometimes a newsletter will stay un-opened in my subscribers inboxes for some time, so how will I know which 3rd party advertisers where involved in the specific issue that made them unsubscribe? Feedback from "leaving subscribers" suggest that they don't leave because of the products I have promoted. They unsubscribe because they don't have time. They unsubscribe because they are changing emailaddresses. They unsubscribe because they don't need the kind of information I'm providing anymore. If they leave for any of these reasons would it then make sense for me to contact 3rd party advertisers. Would it be fair to my subscribers to prevent them from seing advertising from a specific company that they might want to see just because they unsubscribed from my newsletter just after I promoted a product from that company. Is it fair that I should be burdened with contacting 3rd party advertisers just because one of my subscribers doesn't agree with my recommendations? If several of my subscribers has opted out from advertising from several different companies I would have to divide my subscriber list into several sub-lists to prevent each individual subscriber from seing advertising for the specific companies that they opted out from. Let's say I on a regular basis promote products from only 4 different companies (A, B, C & D) This means that I will have to divide my current subscriber list into 16 different sub-lists The letters in the list below indicate advertising from companies that the individual subscriber would see: 1) ABCD 2) ABC 3) ABD 4) ACD 5) BCD 6) AB 7) AC 8) AD 9) BC 10) BD 11) CD 12) A 13) B 14) C 15) D 16) No advertising at all With 5, 6, 7 or more companies being promoted I can't even begin to grasp the complexity and numbers of sub-lists. On different types of forwarding marketing campaigns: People forwarding newsletters to other people should ideally be covered by the act, but I'm sure that my regular subscribers don't have the knowledge about or the needed skills to honor unsubscribe requests related to 3rd party advertisers.