Selling Email Addresses

[Ascari]

Does anyone here sell email lists for marketing? It seems to be quite common for websites with subscription/sign up features to do this.

But my question is, is this legal? And if it is legal to sell email addresses to a 3rd party, is it legal for that 3rd party to contact the email?

As far as I was aware a company cannot directly contact a personal email address without first getting consent from the person whom the email belongs to.

[snakeair]

It's illegal.

This blog post is so helpful in explain things.

CAN-SPAM 101: A Crash Course in Bulk Email Regulations

What is the CAN-SPAM Act, and why is it so important?

George W. Bush signed the CAN-SPAM Act into law in 2003, and its regulations establish how we can build our email lists and distribute commercial email messages. CAN-SPAM stands for “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing.”

The penalties for not following CAN-SPAM regulations are steep. You can be charged up to $16,000 for every email you send that’s not CAN-SPAM compliant. This is not a law you want to gamble with.


CAN-SPAM regulations give email recipients the right to ask businesses to stop emailing them and outline harsh penalties for marketers who don’t comply. They also forbid marketers from misleading or deceiving the people on their email lists.

Continued at: http://www.copyblogger.com/email-laws/

Read the whole thing then ask any more questions that you have.

[HTMLBasicTutor]

Besides the whole legal side of this issue, would you be happy that a site you belong to sold your email address to someone else?

[snakeair]

<--- get's unwanted emails in which I never subscribed to. I take of them though.

[Edgestra]

Does the law apply to noncommercial sites? Like could I start a blog buy list then spam?

[HTMLBasicTutor]

Originally Posted by Edgestra

Does the law apply to noncommercial sites? Like could I start a blog buy list then spam?

Spam is spam....

[mishoppe888]

It's surely Illegal, You must tried subscription process, because in everyone email account there are lost of email everyday, so they don't want unnecessary email in their inbox.

So your message will be goes as SPAM. And if your bounce rate are high, many of the email marketing services also block you account too...

[snakeair]

Originally Posted by Edgestra

Does the law apply to noncommercial sites? Like could I start a blog buy list then spam?

Starting a blog is awesome but buying lists is not awesome, it's the worst mistake you will ever make as a blog owner.

You see these famous bloggers with huge email lists and well the money is in the list. These guru's started out with zero people in there list and took years to get that many people to OPT-IN to there list.

When I send out a mass email to subscribers on a different blog of mine, I know for a fact everyone in the list is already 100% in my blogs niche and the type of content I provide with other special deals. So when I send out a well written email, the odds in my favor I will convert a lot. Don't matter if my list is 20 people... those 20 OPT-IN because they truly are interested in myself or my blog.

Buying a list well get you in trouble over time. As each person reports you online... you get a bad reputation online.

Building a list is hard but each subscriber is there because they are interested in your blog and you of course. That's where you can communicate with them and feed them what they want.

[HannaNguyen]

Originally Posted by snakeair

Starting a blog is awesome but buying lists is not awesome, it's the worst mistake you will ever make as a blog owner.

You see these famous bloggers with huge email lists and well the money is in the list. These guru's started out with zero people in there list and took years to get that many people to OPT-IN to there list.

When I send out a mass email to subscribers on a different blog of mine, I know for a fact everyone in the list is already 100% in my blogs niche and the type of content I provide with other special deals. So when I send out a well written email, the odds in my favor I will convert a lot. Don't matter if my list is 20 people... those 20 OPT-IN because they truly are interested in myself or my blog.

Buying a list well get you in trouble over time. As each person reports you online... you get a bad reputation online.

Building a list is hard but each subscriber is there because they are interested in your blog and you of course. That's where you can communicate with them and feed them what they want.

Hi sneakair, I am looking for a reasonable price email marketing software for my niche site for men fashion.
Do you have any good recommendation for me please. I've tried getresponse but really, it loads too slow.
Please refer the slow page here, where I try to collect email of visitors: http://www.wiseman.vn/dang-ky-email-de-nhan-sach/
Appreciated your advice on this.

[snakeair]

I would choose aweber personally. http://www.aweber.com/pricing.htm

[HannaNguyen]

Thank you very much snakeair.
OMG, look like you're online 24/24 @"@.I see the plan of Aweber kind of expensive.
Should I start to use it now (when my new blog has no traffic yet), or I should wait for some months until people start coming?
:-) :-)

[snakeair]

Wait till you start getting traffic then introducing your subscriber form and let visitors know what to expect in the emails...etc

[lovelyncook]

If you are harvesting people's email addresses to sell without their explicit permission for the very purpose which you want to use the email address for then it would be illegal in most countries.

[usersincenow]

All those people (including me) hate unwanted emails. You could never get any visitor that way and your site will be listed as spam.

[stringks]

Email marketing can be a good factor to achieve new visitors to your site, but sometimes (90%) if you email not the right persons, they will find it spammy and report to you somewhere, and they can do the mouth-of-talk bad for your site, which is a very important factor to a website.