Vet Your Email Addresses Carefully

Spammers need large numbers of email addresses to make their little schemes profitable. If the pool of email addresses large enough, a small percentage of people may respond to their email and send a little money their way. Of the millions of emails they send out, only a small fraction of responses help them generate a profit.

One of the ways spammers obtain email addresses is through email harvesters, programs, or low wage Internet user scouring the web for emails hanging out in the clear where anybody can see them. These harvesters gather up all the emails they find in whois entries, online forums, social networks, and business websites all over the world. They then sell these lists to spammers, and unfortunately, many entry level email marketers looking to make a buck.

In order to minimize the help identify the harvesters and the spammers that use harvested emails, some black hole database administrators post email traps out on the web. These are bare email address showing out in the clear just waiting to be picked up by harvesters. They know that if anybody sends an email to that address, they are basically sending email without permission in violation of all sorts of anti-spam laws and good practice guidelines.

Those who send are then added to their black hole list. More reputable black hole listings have thousands of subscribers and may block email senders who end up on the list. Unfortunately, many beginning email marketers do the same thing the spammers do and purchase these harvested email, which probably have a high percentage of traps included. The first email campaign they send out puts them on the black hole list and the next thing they know, they tarnish their email reputation.

Recently, one vigilante anti-spam group began signing up thier harvested email addresses on thousands of website subscription forms. Those who did not confirm the addresses became inundated with these bogus email address, but the problem was they were only bogus sign ups, the addresses themselves were real and complaints against those sites skyrocketed, causing untold damage to their reputation.

It is true that the CAN-SPAM act of 2003 does not require a subscription confirmation, but all legitimate email marketers do so to protect their highly regarded email reputation. If you want to do things right and communicate with your customers via email, it is important to vet your email addresses in every way possible. Don't buy lists unless you know for certain they are confirmed and clean and always confirm your subscribers to verify they really want to receive your emails.