| 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. This means that purchased, rented, and scraped data does not meet this standard. This policy is in effect because purchased lists do not respect recipient inboxes.
As such, purchased, rented, and scraped lists are considered spam by the email community. These lists cause serious deliverability issues for both individual senders and SharpSpring's network as a whole. By prohibiting purchased, rented, and scraped lists, this policy protects you—as well as the rest of SharpSpring—from blacklisting and poor deliverability.
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 receiving email
Email Verification Services
SharpSpring does not recommend using email verification services to bypass permission. List and email verification services may be part of list maintenance, but they do not guarantee that your sent emails will arrive in the inbox. Since list cleaning services only check for the validity or the otherwise bad status of an address, they cannot convert email addresses into directly opted-in recipients, which is the standard for using recipient lists in SharpSpring. As such, you may want to consider list verification prior to emailing older lists or to gauge the quality of recent sign-ups.
Often, when senders have cleaned their lists with these services, they still have poor inboxing rates. Some emails are outright blocked by anti-spam applications that recipient email 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 frequency that they send email
- The engagement of their recipients
- The relevancy of their content
In fact, the most important thing in sending email is permission. With proper permissions and a good sunsetting policy, you may 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.