Rented email lists can be tricky, and in some cases illegal. The least you can do is clean them…
With consent required in most countries, and explicit, specific consent required in Europe (think GDPR), renting a list of email addresses can be more costly than just the price of the list.
Many email providers require you to prove (or confirm) you have permission to send to the list. This reduces the likelihood of recipients marking the message as spam and risking the reputation of the services IP addresses.
It’s a problem not just for the service, but for you too… With email becoming increasingly centralized across big players (Google, Microsoft, Apple etc), and those players increasingly sharing information on ‘bad’ emails, having a message marked as spam can see both your sending address, and the service providers servers getting blacklisted.
If you do rent a ‘properly permissioned’ list, or even if you are working with an old list of your own, using a service like those in this article to clean the list and remove defunct addresses is the least you should do.
We’re in favor of continuing to email people until they opt out (we’ve seen plenty of business done with ‘old’ lists), but you need to make sure you had permission to begin with, and do what you can to reduce the likelihood of unnecessary spam complaints.
Full Story: Firm Offers Software To Clean Rented Email Lists
