Why buying an email list burns your domain

What happens when you mail a bought list?

Your sending reputation takes the hit. The people on a bought list never asked for your mail, so some of them report it as spam. Many addresses are old or wrong, so they bounce. The rest ignore you. Amazon SES's documentation says email providers read a high bounce rate as a sign that a sender isn't managing their recipient list properly.

The big providers say it plainly. Yahoo's sender best practices tell you not to buy lists. Amazon SES advises you to never purchase, rent or borrow lists of email recipients. Google's Postmaster Tools help asks senders to make sure recipients opt in.

Amazon SES's documentation also says purchased lists can contain spam trap addresses, which is why its terms of service prohibit sending to purchased or rented lists. For the wider picture of how mail ends up in the junk folder, read why emails go to spam.

Which provider limits do you hit with a bought list?

Mailing a bought list raises two numbers: the hard bounce rate and the complaint rate. A hard bounce means the address does not exist. A complaint means the recipient pressed the spam button. Each provider sets its own limit, and you cannot negotiate it. The table collects what the providers publish.

These figures come from the providers' own pages. Yahoo calculates its spam rate from mail delivered to the inbox only, so your own numbers can differ from Yahoo's.

Take a campaign to 10,000 addresses. 500 hard bounces make 5%, the line where Amazon SES places an account under review. Ten complaints make 0.1%, which is the SES review line for complaints. At 30 spam reports you reach 0.30%, the rate Google's guidelines say to stay below. Each provider counts in its own way, so read these figures as a sense of scale.

Is it legal to email a bought list?

It depends on where the recipients live, and in several countries the answer is no. The law there requires the recipient's consent before you write. A bought list gives you no record of that consent unless the seller can show one. This section is a summary, not legal advice.

In the United States, CAN-SPAM works on opt-out. The FTC's compliance guide says you must honor an opt-out request within 10 business days, and your opt-out mechanism must keep working for at least 30 days after you send. It also says both the company whose product is promoted and the company that sent the message can be liable, and it lists civil penalties for each non-compliant email.

Other countries ask for consent first. Germany requires the recipient's prior express consent (§ 7 UWG). France's CNIL treats consent as the rule for messages to individuals. Turkey's Law No. 6563 requires prior consent too. A US-style opt-out does not cover recipients in those countries, so check where your list's addresses live before you send.

Doesn't verifying the list fix it?

No. A verification run shows which addresses can receive mail. It cannot show who agreed to hear from you, and it cannot create that agreement. Removing dead addresses lowers your bounce rate. Spam complaints and the legal question stay where they were.

A tool such as CleanBounceList checks each address for syntax, DNS and SMTP (without sending a message) and labels the result. That helps with a list you built yourself and let age. It does not turn a bought list into one you may mail.

What should you do instead of buying a list?

Grow a list of people who asked for your mail. It takes longer, and it protects your domain. Yahoo's best practices and Amazon SES's documentation describe the same basics.

• Put a signup form where your readers or customers already are: your site, your checkout, your events.
• Use double opt-in. The person confirms by clicking a link in a first message. Yahoo and Amazon SES both recommend it.
• Leave opt-in boxes unticked. Yahoo's best practices say not to pre-check them.
• Send reconfirmation emails to inactive subscribers, as Yahoo suggests. Purge addresses that haven't interacted with your emails recently, as Amazon SES advises.
• Offer something worth an address: a checklist, a template, a short course or early access.
• Send content people asked for, and make unsubscribing easy.

Before each campaign, run through the email list cleaning checklist.

What if you already bought a list?

Stop before you send anything. A list that sits unused costs you nothing. A list that goes out in one campaign can cost you your sending reputation. Work through these steps in order.

1. Stop. Send nothing to the list, including a small test.
2. Do not import it into your sending tool. The Amazon SES terms of service prohibit sending to purchased lists, and other providers set their own rules. Read yours.
3. Reread what the seller promised in writing: how and when the addresses were collected, and whether their owners agreed to receive mail from third parties. If the seller cannot document it, do not use the list.
4. Ask the consent question for each address: who agreed, when, and to what? If you cannot answer, treat the address as not mailable.
5. To keep an address, get consent first. Mailing the list to ask for it would reach people who never agreed to hear from you, so use your own channels: a signup form, an unticked checkbox at checkout, a conversation they started.
6. If a campaign already went out, check the spam rate in Google Postmaster Tools and the bounce and complaint rates in your sending tool. Postmaster data can be missing when your daily volume is low.

Keep the purchase paperwork and a note of what you did with the list. If a provider or a regulator asks questions later, you can show that you stopped.