Today's Ledger has an article about a proposed bill to remove e-mail addresses from public records. According to the story the issue:

The bill's sponsor, Sen. Gwen Margolis, D-Aventura, said residents of the tony town of Palmetto Bay in her district receive e-mail newsletters from the local government. She was concerned that businesses interested in distributing unsolicited e-mails and spam could obtain the e-mail addresses from the town.

On the surface this sounds more like a technical/process issue than a public records issue. There are ways to send e-mail distributions without exposing the e-mail address of every recipient. Unfortunately many people don't do this. They cram all the addresses in the To: field or the CC: field. When you receive the e-mail you see all those other e-mail addresses.

This reminds me of when Randy Wilkinson started sending his famous e-mail newsletters a few years ago. Randy would just send a message to everybody in his Outlook contact list. One side benefit, if you could call it that, was that we learned who all of Randy's contacts were.