I write contact management software for a living. Complaints regarding Unsolicited Bulk Email and SPAM have been getting more and more prevailant over recent weeks and lawmakers are considering strong action against email marketer's... many of whom use software like mine.

We DO NOT BULK mail and never have and never will. We have in the past had users who have abused our service and delivered mail to non-opted recipients. On the FIRST complaint, we shut them off and send them on their way... we go a step further by watching for a variety of personally identifiable characteristics on new signups to ensure that the abusers never come back on our system again. This is where my concerns start.

New legislation could affect my ability to send email to people who have requested to receive email, simply because they have the ability to claim that they did not request the information. We are able (and do) provide IP address logs, confirmation emails, and a variety of other means of identifying that they did request the information, but occasionally, we may still get a complaint. My issue is that now, with a single complaint, I could be charged $250 per mail sent.... that's a whole lot of $250 charges... :-(

Here is a pretty good article on the topic [HERE]. I would love to hear what you think about all this.

I HATE SPAM as much as anyone else, but our software is used for legitimate correspondance and I only hope that it will be allowed to continue.

I will talk tomorrow about an issues that I have with some of AOL's message acceptance policy and reveal how very likely it is that you have not received a message that you were expecting, because they just vaporized it.