Comments:

To: The Federal Trade Commission. re CAN-SPAM Act Rulemaking, Project No. R411008 While I fully support the Commission's efforts to curb the significant problem of unsolicited bulk email, I am extremely concerned about the proposed requirement for merchants to maintain suppression lists. The problems and costs inherent in this idea are more than substantial, to say the very least. In addition, the potential damage which is likely to be caused to both consumers and businesses is so enormous and potentially devastating, that I am urging you in the strongest possible terms to give extremely close consideration to this issue. Requirement of the use of suppression lists will seriously damage many of the legitimate publications available on the internet. As a publisher myself, my specific concern is for potentially devastating harm to publishers who require permission from consumers prior to adding them to any list. I as a legitimate business person am not the one of those who CAN-SPAM was designed to put out of business, but this requirement would be very likely to have that effect. I have worked long and hard at a business which could, quite easily be demolished at the stroke of your pen. In addition, significant harm is likely to be caused to consumers themselves, because of the impossibility of knowing their intent when they unsubscribe from a list. And to make matters worse, these suppression lists could easily fall into the hands of spammers, leading to more spam instead of less! I am extremely concerned at the potential problems this ruling may cause, and urge you in the strongest possible terms to reconsider its implementation in light of these problems, Yours faithfully, Brigitte Smith, Marketing Solutions Group, Inc. P.S. My further comment to question E1.2. above is that if a consumer receives an email from a publisher advertising a company or product of a company and the consumer has opted out of receiving emails from that company, the publisher should NOT be penalised, regardless of what else (if anything) the email contains.