Comments:

Re: CAN-SPAM Act Rulemaking, Project No. R411008 To the Commissioners, While I applaud your efforts to curb the problem of unsolicited bulk email, I am concerned about the proposed requirement for Internet and other merchants to maintain suppression lists that are interrelated with other affiliates or third-party marketers. The many problems and costs associated with this idea, and potential damage to consumers and businesses alike, mandate a different approach. The specific questions above do not truly represent the issue, in my opinion. Spammers who use the spoofing of addresses, social engineering, and corporate espionage will totally circumvent the intent of this act, while the act penalizes the smaller business owner with unrealistic compliance expectations. As an example, the requirement of the use of suppression lists will seriously damage the viablility of many of the legitimate publications available on the net. The sections listed above provide a "cafeteria plan" of poor choices. The requirements can easily be avoided by corporations with the resources to pay for specialized servers or infrastructure to bypass the act, or actually buy political favors by soft money contributions. My specific concern is for harm to electronic document publishers or publishers who require permission from the consumer prior to adding them to ANY type of list. This will hamper small businesses, but not the efforts of companies such as AOL or Microsoft, whose resources allow much larger advertising and marketing budgets. Nor will it have any effect on government use of this technique, as it will probably exempt such bodies from having to comply with this law. Small business newsletters and e-publishers, (while they may not be who CAN-SPAM was designed to put out of business), will be subject to this requirement and will very likely lose out due to unfair competetive practices from larger concerns. This will stifle many of the new entrepreneurs, and in this economy, that will have drastic effects on our country, in my opinion. 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. Additionally, there are not adequate security safeguards to assure that these suppression lists not fall into the hands of spammers, exacerbating the problem. I hope you agree that there are many potential problems this ruling could involve, and urge you in the strongest possible terms to reconsider its implementation in light of these problems, Respectfully, William Cellich, Florida, United States I am an AIIM certified Electronic Content Management Practitioner and a member of the Information System Security Association. I have experience in website development and Internet marketing. My web site is www.ccsproductions.com. Thank you for your time and consideration.