The One Question to Tell if an Email List Vendor Is Legit

The answer to that one simple question will tell immediately if a company offering email names for rent is legitimate or not.

If the answer is "yes," do not under any circumstances do business with the firm offering the names.

Why? Like it or not—and no matter what the law says—email is a permission-based marketing channel.

Email's gatekeepers—system administrators at companies and universities, anti-spam personnel at Yahoo!, Google, Hotmail and the like—exert 100 percent control over what makes it into their email account holders' inboxes and what doesn't.

And here are the three primary metrics email's gatekeepers use to decide whether or not incoming email should be blocked as spam:

1. The number of complaints, or people hitting the "report spam" button, the mailer generates. An unacceptably high number of spam complaints indicates people don't want the marketer's email.

2. The number of unknown users, or non-existent addresses, the mailer tries to reach. These are often the result of people mistyping their address and the mailer failing to verify them. Unknown users indicate the marketer is not exercising list hygiene.

3. The number and type of spam traps the mailer hits. There are two types of spam traps: First, some ISPs, such as Yahoo!, turn email addresses that have been dormant for a long period of time, say, 18 months, into spam traps. ISPs assume, probably correctly, that mailers who hit those address aren't exercising list hygiene.

The second type of spam trap is called a "honey pot" address. These are addresses anti-spam advocates put on the Internet that have never been signed up for anything. Hitting these addresses means the mailer has either been harvesting addresses off the Internet or has bought a list of names from a vendor that has been harvesting addresses.

And guess what a purchased list of email names will be chalk full of? Addresses that send all three of the gatekeepers' anti-spam metrics off the charts, that's what.

As a result, the ISPs will block the mailer's messages as spam.

What is more, not only will the ISPs block email to the names on the purchased list, they'll block email to even the mailers permission-based names.

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