Comments:

In an effort to control and/or stop professional spammers, you have set in motion a potentially devastating set of rules for the legitimate small business people who have found a home online. In these difficult economic times, millions of individuals have found a legitimate means of supplementing or even exceeding their offline income. They do not spam. They are conscientious, law-abiding people who are selling legitimate and legal goods and services. They rely heavily on legitimate email use to carry out much of their business to customers who have requested their information. The internet is a wonderful free-enterprise system. And with all free enterprise systems, there are people who take advantage of it. The professional spammers have found a niche that has been very lucrative for them. If it were not so, they wouldn't continue. Do you really think that this law is going to enable you to disarm those spammers without also ruining the businesses of millions of legitimate people? Please think very carefully about how you proceed. Instead of creating more restrictive laws, it makes more sense to educate people better about taking more responsibility for how they choose to respond to spam-mail. The delete key is the answer. If everyone deletes spam without reading it, the spammers will stop. This may sound simplistic, but does it make less sense than expecting to put illegal spammers out of business with a set of restrictive rules that they will find a way around anyhow? And since most spammers are not within the US, what difference is a US law going to make to them? Just remember that legitimate people will feel the need to follow the rules no matter how restrictive or unrealistic they are. The spammers will find a way around them, or will just ignore them. The bottom line here is, the rules that are in place right now, are completely sufficient - adding more restrictions will put a horrible hardship on legitimate business people and will not accomplish anything useful. Sincerely, Judy Burney