Welcome to the Murky World of E-mail List Sales

Jack Love was shocked when clients told him another firm had offered them his customer list. But his mood quickly turned to anger.

A firm called EmailAppenders had sent e-mail messages to his customers, pitching the Internet Retailer list of conference attendees. They started in the summer, and hit again in the fall.

There was one problem, says Love, the president of Vertical Web Media, which owns the conference: Internet Retailer doesn't let those names out of its sight.

“The list being marketed is not a legitimate list of [our] attendees,” Love says. “We do not sell, rent or reveal that list to anyone. It's our most valuable asset.”

Had the list been stolen? Apparently not.

Ian Cooper, president of new business development for EmailAppenders, says his data services firm never represented the list as the same one owned by Internet Retailer.

“We have the list because we sent one of our sales executives there,” he says. “Is there anything wrong with collecting business cards and selling the list? Who says they gave it to us? We never claimed that.”

Cooper adds that the list compiled this way contains an eyebrow-raising 6,000 names. “There were two of them who collected 600 [cards] a day,” he says.

But Love doesn't believe it. “Anybody collecting cards without a booth would be tossed out,” he says. “We have 50 staffers monitoring the show. That would have to be an intense effort — if you have a booth, you're doing really well if you get 500 cards.”

Love feels he has little recourse but to sue EmailAppenders for misrepresenting his company's list and infringing on its trademark. No such suit has yet been filed.

Welcome to the murky world of e-mail list sales and appending.

When the U.S. failed to outlaw unsolicited commercial e-mail in the Can Spam Act of 2003, it left the door open for companies specializing in selling e-mail addresses. Some are on the up-and-up. Some are not. And it's incredibly difficult to tell who's who.

E-mailAppenders attracted notice last summer when a handful of marketers claimed they'd been ripped off by the firm for small sums. The company appears to be part of a network — how tightly connected is unclear — operating under dozens of aliases.

That hasn't been easy to figure out. Anti-spam outfit Spamhaus says EmailAppenders is part of a group operated by India-based Data Champions/Sloan Marketing. The firm appears to have no physical presence in the United States.

But the ability of e-mail list vendors to find clients raises an even bigger issue.

Although permission-based marketing clearly is the best practice, a huge market apparently exists for e-mail addresses compiled by others. A Google search for “email lists” brings up 3.1 million results containing that exact phrase. A significant number have to be those of third-party compilers.

Yet buying e-mail addresses is risky, and not just for the possible loss of the money spent on them. Mailing to a purchased list can destroy a firm's e-mail reputation as well as the chances of getting all its e-mail delivered.

Spamhaus maintains a list of mailers it deems to be spammers, against which a sizable percentage of inbox providers check incoming e-mail to determine whether to block it as spam. A listing on Spamhaus can cause a marketer to have serious deliverability issues.

Moreover, e-mail inbox providers like Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft convert abandoned e-mail addresses into spam traps. A firm that hits enough of them will be dubbed a spammer — or at least a very sloppy mailer who wastefully consumes others' bandwidth by sending to garbage addresses. And it will be blocked.

Bob Richards, marketing director for Javelin Marketing, learned the hazards of third-party lists the hard way.

Richards, whose firm helps financial advisers get new clients, paid more than $14,000 to EmailAppenders for a list of 100,000 e-mail addresses. But he says 85,000 bounced when mailed, resulting in a server jam. Moreover, his e-mail service provider dumped him.

“They rightfully fired us as a client for spamming,” Richards says.

Richards demanded a refund from EmailAppenders but didn't get one, so he published a press release about his experience and complained about the vendor on RipOffReport.com. He also has registered complaints with the New York State attorney general and the Federal Trade Commission.

EmailAppenders' Cooper claims the list was fine and that Richards' inexperience as a mailer is to blame.

“There are all kinds of factors that affect e-mail deliverability,” he says. “Having a perfect list does not ensure success. This is a client who does not have internal know-how on doing large campaigns and is not willing to let us do it for him.”

He adds: “How can he send 100,000 e-mails from one server in a single day on a weekend? You have to know how to use a big list.”

Cooper also states that Richards previously had done business with EmailAppenders. “He purchased from us,” he says. “He was very happy. He came back.”