A List You Have Not Emailed in Two Years

It has not been waiting for you

An untouched list feels like a stored asset: six hundred people who once had an interest, sitting there ready.

What has actually happened is decay, in several directions at once.

People have changed jobs and their addresses no longer exist. Others have forgotten who you are. Some addresses have been abandoned and repurposed by mail providers as traps.

And the permission that made them a list has, for most of them, expired.

So the question is not how to wake it up. It is whether sending to it is worth what it risks.

What has gone wrong with it

• Dead addresses, which bounce.
• Abandoned addresses repurposed as traps.
• People who have forgotten you and will mark it as junk.
• Expired consent, in most cases.
• No record of how many were added.

The second is the one most people have never heard of and is the most damaging, because it produces no bounce and no complaint while doing more harm than either.

Spam traps specifically

Worth understanding, since it changes the calculation entirely.

Mail providers take addresses that have been abandoned for a long period and reactivate them as traps. Anything arriving at one is, by definition, mail sent to somebody who stopped using the address years ago.

Hitting one is treated as strong evidence that a list is old, unmaintained, or was not collected properly.

You cannot detect them in advance, they look like ordinary addresses, and validation services catch some but not all.

A two-year-old list will contain some, and the older it is the more it contains.

That is the specific reason a burst to an old list can damage a domain that has never had a problem.

Consent has probably lapsed

The other half, and in Canada it is reasonably clear.

Where consent was implied by a purchase or an enquiry rather than actively given, it expires after a period, commonly cited as two years from a transaction and six months from an enquiry.

A list untouched for two years is therefore, for a large share of its entries, a list without a current basis.

Express consent, where somebody actively agreed, does not expire in the same way, which is why the record of how each address was collected matters so much.

This is a general description rather than legal advice, and the detail depends on your situation.

The practical point stands regardless: if you cannot say how an address was obtained, you cannot say whether you may use it.

What it risks against what it gains

The comparison worth making explicitly before deciding.

The gain is some proportion of six hundred people remembering you, which in practice is a handful of enquiries at best.

The risk is your domain's standing, which affects quotes, invoices, and every ordinary message you send, for weeks or months.

For most small businesses those are not comparable quantities. The upside is marketing and the downside is operations.

Which is why the answer for many is not to send to it, however uncomfortable that feels after years of collecting.

A worked example

A business had about eight hundred addresses gathered over five years and had never sent anything.

They sent a single reintroduction message.

Around a hundred and forty bounced, a dozen complained, and delivery of ordinary business email degraded for roughly two months afterwards.

The message produced three enquiries, one of which became a job.

They spent the two months explaining to customers why quotes were arriving in spam folders.

Afterwards they built a new list by asking properly, reached about a hundred and twenty over the following year, and that list has produced steady work with no incident.

If you are going to send anyway

Because sometimes the list genuinely has value and the decision is made.

Run it through a validation service first, which removes the obviously dead and reduces the bounce rate substantially.

Send through a mailing service, never from your own mailbox or server.

Start with the most recent additions, in small batches of a few dozen, and watch the bounce and complaint figures after each.

Stop entirely if bounces exceed a small percentage or any complaints arrive, rather than continuing through the list.

Make the message obviously a reintroduction, say when and how you got the address, and make leaving easier than staying.

That sequence takes weeks rather than an evening, which is the point.

The alternative worth considering

Not sending, and using the list differently.

An old list is still a record of people who once had contact with you, which has value that does not require emailing them.

Past customers can be telephoned, which is permitted where email is not and is considerably more effective for a small number of high-value contacts.

Addresses can be matched into advertising audiences in some platforms, subject to their own rules.

And the list tells you something about where your customers came from, which informs where to look for the next ones.

None of that carries the deliverability risk, and for a list of a few hundred the telephone is frequently the better instrument anyway.

The counter-case

Not every old list is dangerous.

A list where everybody actively subscribed, with dates recorded, that has simply not been used, is in a different position from a collection of business cards, and the consent point does not apply in the same way.

Business-to-business lists also decay differently, and a company address that still exists is a different proposition from a personal one that does not.

There is also a version of this advice that is too cautious, where a business with a genuine subscriber list never contacts it out of fear and wastes something it built properly.

The question is what you can prove about how each address arrived. Where you can prove it, proceed carefully. Where you cannot, do not.

The decision

1. Check what you know about how each was collected.
2. Assume implied consent has expired.
3. Compare the gain against your delivery standing.
4. Consider not sending as a legitimate answer.
5. Validate first if you proceed.
6. Send in small batches and watch the figures.
7. Telephone the valuable ones instead.

Step three is the comparison that decides it, since the upside is a few enquiries and the downside is every quote you send for two months.

The process itself is covered in cleaning a list you have neglected.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.