Is Your Email Address For Sale?

Have you ever wondered what happens to your email address once you give it an online marketer?

For the most part nothing, other than the person sending you regular emails with content and promotions/offers related to what every niche they happen to be a part of. This is the norm and one of the reasons you gave them your email in the first place.

Some of these lists can get pretty big and this presents another opportunity for the list owners to make some extra money. They can do this by either selling the email addresses on the list altogether or break it up by specific demographics (i.e gender, location, age) or the latest 1000+ people to sign up.

Where Do They Find The Buyers?

There is a site called Nextmark.com and it is one of the biggest sites for buying and selling mailing lists. This includes telephone lists, email address lists and home address lists. Currently there are over 60,000 different lists available which is crazy if you think about it and I’m sure that I am on many of them.

There is a feature that allows you to search for different mailing lists by keyword. In the example below I searched for lists related to “weight loss” and the #1 result was a shocker!

I am not going to post the name of it here but let me tell you that I was disappointed to know that they were offering up email addresses for sale.

Is This illegal?

Well, no buying and selling mailing lists is perfectly legal as far as I know and very useful for charities and non profit organizations. But… In my opinion I consider this a form of SPAM. When I buy a product or opt in to someones subscriber list, it’s my understanding that I am only giving permission for that person/company to contact me. Otherwise it’s unsolicited.

Final Thoughts

Before a few days ago I never knew that this was how some list owners operated. Being a list owner myself I know how valuable my subscribers are to me. They have put there trust me and I will honor it by never selling their email address to anyone.

Like I said with 60,000 plus mailing lists odds are pretty good that your email address it up for sale somewhere.

Have Your Say!

Leave a comment and let me know what you think. Am I wrong about buying/selling mailing lists or maybe I’m not understanding the whole process? Have you ever bought or sold a list yourself?