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What does Spamhaus think of email append?


Today I stumbled across SBL listing SBL120550, which says the following:

"Several IPs in this /28 are sending spam to spamtraps advertising the services of ADT Home Security. The IPs belong to InfoCanada, a division of InfoUSA, via their Yesmail ESP.

InfoUSA also sells purchased and e-pended lists. We do not know whether the purchased list that the customer is using is using came from InfoUSA, but we consider the sales of purchased and e-pended lists to be spam support by definition. Use of such lists is a reliable path to an SBL listing."
(Emphasis added.)

There you have it, straight from Spamhaus themselves, explaining exactly what they think of purchased and e-pended (email append) lists.

Laura Atkins of Word to the Wise has compiled some very helpful ISP Summary Information, showing that, for starters, the SBL is used as a spam filter at AT&T, Comcast, Cox, RoadRunner, and Yahoo. Meaning, use of email append can lead to a blacklisting by Spamhaus, which leads to blocking at those ISPs. And they're not the only ones who use Spamhaus; I think Hotmail and Gmail do, too. Not to mention, many other smaller ISPs and corporate sites.

3 Comments

Comments policy: Al is always right. Kidding, mostly. Be polite, please and thank you.

  1. Al, I was wondering what your thoughts on Netprospex are. We have been using them for data append and are thinking of buying a b2b email list from them. Their sales vp says they are can spam compliant and perfectly legal / within our rights to send email from their lists, but it would be great if you could clear up any downside risks.

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  2. I think that a purchased list such as that for a list growth strategy is like buying a lottery ticket as a retirement strategy. You might get lucky, but more often than that, nothing happens. Or worse, you end up mailing to spamtraps and you get blacklisted.

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  3. "legal according to can spam" simply means that the FTC won't prosecute you for spamming.

    There's nothing in there about email appending becoming a best practice because it isnt specifically prohibited in canspam

    And there's nothing at all in saying that sending mail to appended and coreg lists won't get you blocked.

    As Al said, and as spamhaus have said, that's as good a way to get blocked at a variety of places as any.

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