Purchased Lists and ESPs

After some thought, I’ve decided to remove a few ESPs from this list based on personal experience with them allowing customers to send to purchased lists. If your company has disappeared and you want to come back, you’ll need to actually stop the spam coming from your network. Every company that’s been removed has received a complaint from me specifically mentioning the address was purchased and allowed that same customer to continue spamming the same address. Deal with your spam and we can talk about reinstatement. 

One thing almost every ESP delivery person has dealt with, at one time or another, is a customer complaining about being unable to send to a purchased list. Inevitably, the customer will say “But other-ESP lets us send to purchased lists, why won’t you?” I’ve heard this over and over from many different colleagues.
Of course, the customer is almost always leaving other-ESP because of poor delivery. They think changing ESPs will improve their delivery. The problem is delivery is often poor because the ESP lets customers send to purchased lists. Purchased lists usually perform poorly because many list sellers are not very conscientious about permission.
ShadyGuyWebsite
What ESPs don’t allow purchased lists?
Act-On
APSIS
Amazon SES
Autopilot Journeys
AWeber
Bronto
Campaign Monitor
Constant Contact
ContactPigeon
dotmailer
Dyn
Expertsender
GreenArrow
HubSpot
iContact
Infusionsoft
Klaviyo
Mad Mimi
MagNews
MailChimp
MailerMailer
Mailivy
Mailjet
MailUp
Mapp Digital
Marketo
Maropost
MessageGears
Omnisend
Ortto
ONTRAPORT
Oracle
Responsys
Sailthru
Salesfusion
SendinBlue
Sendamatic
SharpSpring
SimplyCast
SocketLabs
SparkPost
StrongView
Swiftpage
These are the big ESPs that drive the market and they don’t allow purchased lists. There’s a reason for this. ESPs that allow purchased lists don’t have great delivery. Their customers send a lot of unwanted and unsolicited email and it taints all the mail coming from their space. I’ve done work for a couple ESPs that that had all their client mail, even the permission stuff, going to bulk at places like Yahoo! and Gmail.
Purchased lists drive delivery problems.
What’s more, the ESP reps know when customers say other-esp lets us send to purchased list it may not be true. I’ve heard at least 3 or 4 of the above ESPs listed as allowing purchased lists. But they don’t. Sure, some customers can, and probably do, get away with purchasing lists and mail them off the ESP. But if they get caught they’re either disconnected or they’re told to stop sending to the purchased list.
Many ESPs prohibit the use of purchased address lists and for good reasons.
Note: if you’d like your ESP added to this list, please contact me (email or in the comments) with a link to your published no purchased lists policy and I’ll add you here.

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Email verification services

Just yesterday a group of delivery folks were discussing email verification services over IRC. We were talking about the pros and cons, when we’d suggest using them, when we wouldn’t, which ones we’ve worked with and what our experiences have been. I’ve been contemplating writing up some of my thoughts about verification services but it’s a post I wanted to spend some time on to really address the good parts and the bad parts of verification services.
Today, Spamhaus beat me to the punch and posted a long article on how they view email verification services. (I know that some Spamhaus folks are part of that IRC channel, but I don’t think anyone was around for the discussion we had yesterday.)
It’s well worth a read for anyone who wants some insight into how email verification is viewed by Spamhaus. Their viewpoints are pretty consistent with what I’ve heard from various ISP representatives as well.
In terms of my own thoughts on verification services, I think it’s important to remember that the bulk of the verification services only verify that an address is deliverable. The services do not verify that the address belongs to the person who input it into a form. The services do not verify that an address matches a purchased profile. The services do not verify that the recipient wants email from the senders.
Some of the services claim they remove spamtraps, but their knowledge of spamtraps is limited. Yes, stick around this industry long enough and you’ll identify different spamtraps, and even spamtrap domains. I could probably rattle off a few dozen traps if pressed, but that’s not going to be enough to protect any sender from significant problems.
Some services can be used for real time verification, and that is a place where I think verification can be useful. But I also know there are a number of creative ways to do verification that also check things like permission and data validity.
From an ESP perspective, verification services remove bounces. This means that ESPs have less data to apply to compliance decisions. Bounce rate, particularly for new lists, tells the ESP a lot about the health of the mailing list. Without that, they are mostly relying on complaint data to determine if a customer is following the AUP.
Spamhaus talks about what practices verification services should adopt in order to be above board. They mention actions like clearly identifying their IPs and domains, not switching IPs to avoid blocks and not using dozens or hundreds of IPs. I fully support these recommendations.
Email verification services do provide some benefit to some senders. I can’t help feeling, though, that their main benefit is simply lowering bounce rates and not actually improving the quality of their customers’ signup processes.

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Some content is just bad; but it doesn't have to be

There are a few segments in the marketing industry that seem to acquire senders with bad mailing practices. Nutraceuticals, male performance enhancing drugs, short term or payday loans and gambling have a lot of senders that treat permission as optional. The content and the industry themselves have garnered a bad reputation.
This makes these industries extremely difficult for mailers who actually have permission to send that content to their recipients. Working with this kind of sender, sometimes it seems impossible to get mail delivered to the inbox, no matter what the level of permission. Even when it’s double confirmed opt-in with a cherry on top, all the care in the world with permission isn’t enough to get inbox delivery.
This doesn’t have to be the case. Look at the porn industry. Early on in the email marketing arena there was a lot of unsolicited image porn. A Lot. So much that complaints by recipients drove many ISPs to disable image loading by default. The legitimate porn companies, though, decided unsolicited image porn was bad for the industry as a whole. Porn marketers and mailers adopted fairly strong permission and email address verification standards.
It was important for the porn marketers that they be able to prove that the person they were mailing actually requested the email. The porn marketers took permission seriously and very few companies actually send photographic porn spam these days. Even the “Russian girls” spam doesn’t have not safe for work images any longer.
Because of their focus on permission, in some cases revolving around age of consent in various jurisdictions, the porn industry as a whole is not looked at as “a bunch of spammers.” Porn content isn’t treated as harshly as “your[sic] pre-approved for a wire transfer” or “best quality drugs shipped overnight.”
Just having offensive content isn’t going to get you blocked. But having content that is shared by many other companies who don’t care about permission, will cause delivery headache after delivery headache. This is true even when you are the One Clean Sender in the bunch.
 

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Old Lists and RadioShack

RadioShack is putting their assets up for sale including more than 65 million customer records and 13 million email addresses. Many are up in arms about the sale of personal data including the Texas Attorney General and AT&T who both want the data destroyed.
Part of the controversy is that RadioShack’s privacy policy states the collected data will be only used by RadioShack and its affiliates and that they will not “sell or rent your personally identifiable information to anyone at any time”. Company acquisitions happen all the time and data like this is often sold to the new owner and the sale of customer data is common. The problem with RadioShack selling the customer data is that their privacy policy states they will never sell the information.
RadioShack was one of the first companies to ask for personal information at checkout, sometimes refusing a sale without providing it and the collection of data during checkout caught on quickly. Having demographic information for retargeting of customers is extremely valuable to marketers, but only if it’s valid data. With RadioShack, people often lie about their zip code and if they are giving incorrect zip codes I’m pretty sure their email address isn’t going to be valid either. Even Kramer asks why does RadioShack ask for your phone number…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgfaYKoQxzQ
If a client asked if this was a good investment and if the list had value, I would tell them no. Sending to this list will have poor delivery because the data is dirty and the lack of a clear opt-in is going to be problematic especially since a RadioShack customer is not expecting to receive mail from you. Many ESPs have policies prohibiting sending to a purchased list and doing so will hurt your relationship with the ESP.
If a client had already purchased the list and wanted to send to it, I would tell them their reputation is going to take a significant hit and I would discourage them from sending. The list is going to be full of domains that no longer exist and contain abandoned email addresses including ones that have been turned into spam traps.
When preparing to send to a new list of email addresses, I go through this process:

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