Understanding Purchased Email Recipient Lists and Email Verification Services

SharpSpring does not permit senders to use purchased, rented, scraped, or stolen lists. Their use violates the SharpSpring Terms of Service. This article will provide information on the many issues with purchased email lists.

The following user roles can send emails:

• Administrators
• Marketing Managers

Article Contents

• Purchased List Policy
• Email Verification Services
• Ready to Learn More?

Purchased List Policy

SharpSpring expects customers to only email recipients who have expressly opted-in, and purchased lists do not meet this standard. This policy is in effect because purchased lists do not respect recipient inboxes. As such, they 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.

Email Verification Services

Email verification services are services that are often advertised as a solution to recipient lists of unknown integrity. These services are also known as list cleaning services. 

List cleaning typically run your list against their internal, proprietary list of so-called bad addresses. Some of these may be as follows:

• Invalid address syntax
• Known bounced addresses
• Defunct domains

SharpSpring does not recommend using these services. SharpSpring recognizes that purchased lists cannot be cleaned with list cleaning services. Since list cleaning services only check for the validity 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.