Comments:

As I have read and re-read the Can-Spam Act, I see that it iwll do little to curb the sending of spam, since most of the real culprits are not legitimate marketers. The peril here is that the act will severley curtail and harm the use of e-mail for legitimate marketing purposes. As an example, we provide marketing services to a number of sports clients. I also personally subscribe to e-mail from sports teams and leagues that I follow. I have no problem if one of those league uses my address to send me information on a sponsor program. If i had opted off that sponsor's mailing list, should they be penalized becasue the NFL sent me an e-mail about a related promotion. I receive over 150 pieces of spam a day. None of these are from the dozens of legitimate companies we do business with. Rather they are from companies that have spidered an e-mail address off one of our web sites. The bulk are for porn, Viagra and money scams. Most don't have a legitimate e-mail address. The problem with spam is not legitimate comapies who adhere to standards, it is with the bottom feeders who send out millions of unsolicited e-mails in the hopes of finding some suckers. The Can-Spam act already has us re-thinking how we legitimately market tovisitors to our web site. For example, we have in the past sent a marketing message about a product to mailing lists who may have signed up for a similar subject. IE-if you signed up to receive soccer news, we might have sent you an e-mail about a soccer product. If anyone objected to receiving this, they were immediately removed from the list. Now I understand they could sue us, or we could be fined. The beauty of e-mail marketing is its easy and cost effectiveness. Curbing how companies use it would be detrimental to the economy and still won't solve the problem. Many commercially available spam filters cut some of the clutter. For me, and my more tha 100 messages a day, the delete key works as well.