| SharpSpring does not permit senders to use purchased, rented, scraped, stolen, appended, or concatenated emails or lists. Their use violates the SharpSpring Terms of Service. This article will provide information on the many issues with purchased email lists.
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Understanding Compliance Terminology
There are certain compliance terms to consider when dealing with email verification:
| Term | Definition | |||
| bad address |
Email addresses that pertain to any of the following:
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concatenated |
Linking together fragments of known customer data, such as name and company website information, in spreadsheets or databases to create or obtain email addresses. |
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email appending |
Matching known customer data, such as name and company website information, against vendor databases to create or obtain email addresses. |
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| email verification service |
Services that are often advertised as a solution to recipient lists of unknown integrity by checking if the email address is deliverable or not. |
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purchased data |
Data provided by a third party for a fee or provided free during a trial. |
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| rented mailing |
Sending on behalf of another company using their content and sending to a list they do not own. Also referred to as sponsored mailing. |
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| scraped data |
Data acquired with the use of tools or manual efforts to collect email addresses from websites. Also referred to as harvested data. |
Purchased List Policy
SharpSpring expects customers to only email recipients who have expressly opted-in, and purchased data in the form of purchased lists do not meet this standard. This policy is in effect because purchased lists do not respect recipient inboxes.
As such, purchased lists are considered spam by the email community. These lists cause serious deliverability issues for individual senders and SharpSpring's network as a whole. By prohibiting purchased lists, this policy protects you—as well as the rest of SharpSpring—from IP and domain blacklisting.
Purchased lists are:
- Illegal in Canada, per Canada's anti-spam legislation (CASL)
- Against SharpSpring's Acceptable Use Policy
- Against every reputable email service provider's Acceptable Use Policy
- Against every Internet service provider's Acceptable Use Policy
- Often struck low by poor inboxing
- Stopped by spam filters
- Characterized by low opens and clicks, along with high unsubscribes and spam complaints
- A reason many people do not like email, due to this spam
Email Verification Services
SharpSpring does not recommend using email verification services. SharpSpring recognizes that purchased lists cannot be cleaned with list cleaning services. Since list cleaning services only check for the validity or the otherwise bad status of an address, they cannot convert recipients into opted-in recipients, which is the standard for using recipient lists in SharpSpring.
Often, when senders have cleaned their lists with these services, they still have poor inboxing rates. Some are outright blocked by anti-spam applications that recipient mail servers put up. At this point, it is not that these senders' lists are clean enough. Rather, these senders need to review the permissions that recipients gave them. The most important thing in sending email is permission. With permission, you never need to have your list cleaned by a third-party service.
SharpSpring helps customers by only advising to send to recipients who have expressly opted-in. Starting with good permission, you just have to clean your list incrementally by removing bounced addresses, spam complaints, unsubscribes, and unengaged recipients as part of your own ongoing list management. Senders practicing such list management have consistently excellent deliverability.
- How to move towards permission-based list acquisition, such as confirmed opt-in
- How to delete purchased lists from their SharpSpring account
Senders may be terminated if a mutually agreeable improvement plan on how to move away from purchased lists cannot be developed.