The Email List Somebody Offered to Sell You

The offer in the inbox

It arrives most weeks, from an address you have never seen: ten thousand verified email addresses of business owners in your area, or homeowners in your postal codes, for a few hundred dollars.

Some offers come with a sample. Some promise the list is fully opted in and compliant. Most are cheerful about how quickly it will fill your calendar.

For a business that wants more customers and has no list of its own, it looks like a shortcut.

It is a shortcut to a legal problem, and to an email address that stops reaching people, including the customers you already have.

What is actually on the list

• Scraped addresses, copied from websites and directories without anybody's knowledge.
• Old addresses that bounce, or now belong to somebody else.
• Spam traps, addresses kept only to catch senders of unsolicited mail.
• Shared inboxes such as info and office, read by nobody in particular.
• People nowhere near your service area, whatever the sample suggested.

The third is the one that does lasting damage. A spam trap never asked for anything, so a message reaching one is proof, to whoever runs it, that the sender is mailing people who did not ask.

What CASL requires

Canada's anti-spam law, CASL, has applied to commercial email since 2014. It asks three things of every commercial message.

Consent, express or implied. Identification: who is sending, with a mailing address and a way to get in touch. And an unsubscribe that works, honoured within ten business days.

Consent is the part that matters here. It is given by a person, to a sender, and if anybody ever asks, the sender has to prove it.

The CRTC enforces the law, and it has fined businesses for sending commercial email without consent.

Why a bought list cannot carry consent

A broker may say everybody on the list opted in. Opted in to what, and from whom, is the question.

Somebody who ticked a box on another site agreeing to hear from unnamed partners did not consent to hear from your business, and you have no record that they did anything at all.

Sellers also say the addresses were publicly available. CASL does allow implied consent for a conspicuously published address, but only when the message relates to that person's role and the listing did not refuse unsolicited messages.

Proving that, address by address, would be your job, not the seller's. Nobody buying ten thousand addresses can.

What it does to your email

Mailbox providers decide where a message lands partly from the sender's history.

A bought list produces exactly the history they look for in spammers: bounces, hits on spam traps, and complaints from people who do not recognise the name and press the spam button.

That reputation attaches to the domain the email comes from, and often to the servers it was sent through. The next invoice, the next quote and the next reply to a customer can start landing in junk.

Most email marketing services forbid bought lists in their terms and suspend accounts that use them, because one sender's bad list damages delivery for everybody else on the service.

A worked example

A commercial cleaning company with six crews bought a list of local business addresses two years ago, and sent an introductory offer from the office email account in batches over a week.

Bounces filled the inbox. A few recipients replied angrily, and more simply marked the message as spam.

Within days, quotes the company sent to property managers it already knew started going unanswered. One mentioned later that the quote had arrived in junk, alongside the offer.

The server sending the office email had been added to a blocklist. Getting it removed took weeks, and the domain's reputation took longer to recover.

The list was deleted. The company now sends a short seasonal email, through a proper service, to clients and enquirers who ticked a box asking for it.

Why a small list does better

A list of three hundred past clients and enquirers looks less impressive on paper than ten thousand strangers. In practice it behaves completely differently.

The people on it know the name, so they open the message and rarely report it. Providers notice, and deliver the next message to the inbox rather than to junk.

They are also the people most likely to buy again or recommend you, because they already have once.

Building one properly

Put a sign-up form on the website, saying plainly what people will receive and how often.

Add an unticked box to the quote and contact forms, and to the checkout if you sell online. Ask in person at the counter, after a finished job or at an event, and record the answer.

A small reason to sign up is fine, such as a seasonal maintenance reminder, as long as the wording says plainly that signing up means receiving email.

For every address, keep the date, how the person signed up, and the wording they agreed to. Under CASL, that record is your proof.

The customers you already have

CASL gives implied consent where there is an existing business relationship: two years from a purchase or contract, six months from an enquiry.

That makes recent customers a legitimate starting list for most businesses, with a time limit. Ask them for express consent before the period runs out, and they stay on the list until they unsubscribe.

The counter-case

Reaching strangers is a fair goal; email is the wrong tool for it.

Search ads, a printed mailer to a postal area, a sponsorship or a well-kept business listing reach people who have never heard of you, without a consent problem.

A business that sells to a handful of large clients may not need a marketing list at all. Personal emails to people it already works with, covered by that relationship, may be all the email marketing it needs.

For email, though, the rule is simple: build the list, never buy it.

Instead of buying

1. Delete the offer without replying.
2. List customers from the past two years.
3. Ask them for express consent.
4. Add a sign-up form to the website.
5. Add an unticked box to every enquiry form.
6. Record how each person signed up.
7. Send through a proper service, never the office account.

Step six is the one that makes the rest defensible. A list without records is a list you cannot prove, which under CASL is not much better than a list you bought.

Looking after the list you already have is covered in a mailing list nobody has cleaned since 2014.

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.