Last week, in an e-mail marketing training I taught, I was talking about permission e-mail marketing and what it implies, that's grow your own home list. One of the main concerns people had is that going this way it's going to take ages to grow a good list. And that's true: it is a hard and long-time task that deserves all your attention and care.
The first temptation everyone experiments is to google a little bit in order to find a way to buy a list from someone else. That's a very bad idea.
There are a lot of reasons for not doing that, but the main is that - ethics and law apart- for the same reason you can buy it, anyone else can buy it too. So, there is no control over who can send mail to the list and how many times. Does it sound familiar to you? Yes, that's plain spam.
One typical list has an obsolescence rate that ranges from 15 to 30% in a year. That means that if the list you buy is one year old and it has 100.000 e-mails in it, you will probably get some 20.000 or more bounced mails when you use it. And probably it will be older and unusable.
Besides, these lists are normally made by e-mail spiders. These are special applications that sniff web pages in search of e-mail addresses. A lot of web pages have "honey pot" addresses. They are in the HTML code of the page, but they're not visible for the visitors, only to the e-mail spiders. When someone sends an e-mail to this "honey pots" the sender is added to a black list and is considered a spammer, because the only way that you may know this address is by using an illegal e-mail collector. So, if you use a list that, no doubt, will have several of this "honey pot" addresses you'll end up in a lot of black lists out there, damaging forever your reputation and your deliverability.
So the moral is: Grow your own permission list. It's hard and it takes time, but is a guarantee of quality, legitimacy and good practices. In this case less is more. Never ever buy or download an e-mail list. And if you do, please don't use MAILCast for your e-mailings :-(