Permission is not a legal concept

One trap I see companies fall into when looking at opt-in and permission is they seem to think that permission is a blanket thing. They believe permission can be bought and sold by the companies that collected email addresses.

Legally, they may be correct. But in practice senders cannot decide that they can sell the permission of their recipients to another entity. As Al said today, you cannot buy an existing business relationship. When commenting on that post over on twitter, Evan Burke had a series of very insightful tweets on the issue.

Evan is exactly right.

Coincidentally, I had a potential client call me this morning to discuss the delivery problems they were having with a list. At the end of the call he also mentioned that they had a list of 7 million addresses that had been sitting around and they wanted to incorporate it into their list. I was open minded about the chances to recover the list, until he dropped that the list was 10 years old. I have to admit, I probably was not the cheery, positive, put a friendly face for the potential client consultant in responding to that.

But, really, there’s no way someone who opted in 10 years ago is going to remember they opted in to receive mail from whatever list has been found.

One thing that senders, list sellers and lawyers have to remember is that recipients are the final arbiters of permission. They know what they agreed to and if they don’t think this list, or this brand, or this sender has permission they will respond with spam complaints. The result is decreasing reputation for the sender followed by increasing delivery problems. Just because the sender thinks they have permission doesn’t mean the recipients agree with them.

Related Posts

Delivery Blog Carnival – Selling, trading and renting email addresses

A couple weeks ago, I linked to a comment from a marketer mentioning that email addresses should be able to be traded around like snail mail addresses. I suggested this might be a good topic to hear from a lot of different people on.
Mickey posted List Rental is…. In that post he looked at how email is different from direct mail and how the attitudes are different as well.
The folks at Bronto got into the spirit of the blog carnival and Kristin, Kelly and Chris all contributed to a single post offering their perspectives on trading lists, intrusive marketing and delivery.
Al Iverson has two posts on buying lists. One is an older post talking about the delivery hassles and problems related to purchased lists from the perspective of a ESP delivery expert. Over on his SpamResource blog, he posts about the same issue from the perspective of a recipient who is tired of receiving spam.
I also posted on the issue, looking at how email is not snail mail and senders cannot be successful in email by applying the direct mail rules.
Thanks to everyone who submitted posts.

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Buying Data

Over on Spam Resource Al posted about data sellers and the ESP that supports them. As part of the post, he lists the pricing for email address lists.

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Two reasons not to buy a list

Ken Magill, celebrity, has two articles today that highlight the issue with buying lists from vendors. The first is yet another article about EmailAppenders selling bad data. In this case, it is not the buyers who are complaining. According to Ken EmailAppenders are sending out email advertising they can sell Internet Retailer’s list of 2008 conference attendees. Internet Retailer is disputing this and has sent EmailAppenders a cease and desist. EmailAppenders is currently dodging Ken’s attempts to get their side of the story.
The second is an article about Zoominfo, a new group in the list selling business. Zoominfo has long been harvesting information from other sites. Now, they are offering to sell their scraped and harvested list. Their only requirement is that the buyer sign an agreement to comply with CAN SPAM. And, yes, if someone is dumb enough to buy this harvested list, they should comply with CAN SPAM as sending mail to a harvested list triggers additional penalties if or when the FTC decides to go after the sender.
Not only are Zoominfo harvesting data, they are harvesting from ancient and obscure sources. They have no current information for me, but they managed to find an email address for a job I left in 1993. They have Steve listed as an employee of “postgreSQL INC” because they harvested the postgres mailing list archives. Mickey pointed out one of Zoominfo’s sources is http://free-personal-ads-wanted-sex-partner-near-hays-kansas.themasterwithin.ca/arch/4/. You do not even need to visit that site, just look at the URL!
Zoominfo’s VP and general manager claims they send emails to people regularly, offering them the chance to opt-out. First of all, I have never received one of these, have any of you? Secondly, some of the addresses are so old opt-outs are not relevant. Finally, unless they are monitoring their delivery, which I strongly doubt given their business model, anyone buying addresses from them is going to buy lots of dead addresses. And spamtraps. Lots of spamtraps.
I am sure that people who buy and sell lists regularly will tell me that these are outliers and that most companies who sell lists have higher data collection standards. My experience suggests that these are middle of the road list brokers. They are companies who are willing to sell anything with an @ sign in it and do not care about how sending to that data affects their customers.

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