You sound pretty bitter, Bill

> In retrospect, The CAN-SPAM law is doing nothing to reduce spam. Only
> legitimate marketers are abiding by the law and those of us who do follow
> the letter of the law find increased numbers of false complaints from spam
> nazi's.

Hey! I resemble that remark!

Seriously, idiots who forget about signing up and also confirming their subscriptions are a big problem. That's why you need to retain the confirmation proof for all subscriptions, and never buy lists of unknown pedigree.

But I report dozens of spams a day where the sender has no such proof. Some spam is sent to addresses that never existed until I saw attempts in my logs that were being rejected. Since most spammers never look at their rejection logs, I activated those bogus addresses, and those are now pure spamtraps. ANYTHING sent to them is automatically spam, since that address could not have opt-ed in to ANYTHING!

> It IS a big deal when you have to go to the trouble of producing their opt
> in and their confirmation.

It's a cost of business made necessary by the spammers. Blame them, not me, and not the ISPs.

You'd be astonished to see the FORGED confirmation logs created out of whole cloth by spammers when they're desperately trying to save their domains. There is hardly any depth to which they won't sink when cornered.

> The biggest problem, however, is the fact that ISPs are getting so
> aggressive at blocking what is perceived to be spam. Return Path
> Consulting found recently that over 19% of legitimate opt-in pieces were
> being blocked by ISPs even though the addressee had opted in and the
> pieces were legal. Pivotal Verocity did similar research and found 13% of
> legal e-mails were blocked by AOL alone.

Terrible problem. Blame the spammers.

> What this means is that a small company dropping 10,000 e-mails a month
> would have as many as 1900 of them blocked. At a cost of up to 10 cents
> each that's an unnecessary expense of $190.00 that the ISP's should be
> responsible for.

ISPs are doing what their customers demand. The customers are perfectly free to find a less-aggressive ISP and vote with their feet and leave, then they'll get all the opt-in email they want, plus a butt-load of spam, and the process will start all over.

> What the CAN-SPAM law needs is some teeth to go after the real spammers
> and some measure of protection for business operating within the law.

The law is useless without vigorous enforcement. The law doesn't increase funding for any federal agency, and it TOOK AWAY the right of private action (i.e.: small claims court) that allows private citizens to act as private attorneys general to assist the government enforcing the law. Removing this over-ride of state laws would be a great first step, but it was vigorously and expensively lobbied for by the DMA (Direct Marketing Association) - the snail-mail lobbying arm.

> By
> this I mean that if a person files a fraudulent SPAM complaint the company
> filed against should be able to collect damages. I think a fair amount
> would be $25.00. It would be very simple to modify the law so that the ISP
> be required to collect $25 whenever anyone files a spam complaint.

Nonsense. Never happen. The free speech rights of spam victims would be suppressed. Anybody can file a spam complaint. If the ISP wishes to ignore complaints from bozos who file frivolous ones, that's their right.

> Then if
> the complaint proves true the Fee would be returned, however if the
> company provides proof thet the complaining party did in fact opt in or
> that the complaint is in fact invalid the company receives the fee for
> their trouble. I know in my case this simple modification would hav eput
> about $2500 in my pocket and perhaps made a few people be a little more
> careful about making unfounded claims.

You've had 100 bogus spam complaints! I'm shocked. Where did you get the list that generated this level of complaints? Did you have the opt-in and confirmation proof for all 100?