Comments:

Local businesses should be completely exempt from the act if they are sending messages that are reasonably within their trade area. Business to business messages should be exempt from the act. A do not e-mail registry would be a huge burden on any small business. The real problem, aside from unwanted porn, is the sender hiding behind fraudulent addresses. Any message from a legitimate e-mail address should not be considered spam regardless of it's content. The receiver can either ask that messages cease or the receiver can filter the messages to delete them. This technology is already widely available. Fraudelent techniques like falsification of sender information or purposely adding irrelevent words or misspelled or altered words to a message are the earmark of the spam that most people complain of. If the message is from a real address without using fraudulent tecniques, then it should not fall into the domain of the act. Rewarding reporting parties completely turns this into a vigilante system. The act should not be creating a new industry. Rewards or any prosecution puts small business at risk. Consider a competitor or just an angry nut using the act to drain the business's resources. The act puts a huge burden on small domestic business while doing nothing to deal with the overseas spam. There should be no individual right to remedies under the act. It should be the ISP's alone who have a right to remedies. Individuals have plenty of methods to avoid spam by filtering or deleting it. ISP's are burdened with transmitting it.