Hell hath no fury like a marketer duped. A company called Javelin Marketing has posted a press release in which they claim that an email list vendor sold them a 100,000 address mailing list with an 85% bounce rate. According to Javelin, the list cost them $14,000 and the massive wave of non-deliverables led to their email hosting service canceling their account. Ouch.

I don't know anything about either of the companies involved, so I can't comment on the truth or falsity of this account. If the claim is untrue, then I suspect that the list vendor will have something to say about it, and they'll say it with lawyers. But I can make a general observation.

When you purchase a mailing list, you are taking a significant risk. You are basically gambling the reputation of your business on the assumption that the vendor who says they have 100,000 'opt-in' addresses isn't lying through their teeth. If it turns out that they're selling you the usual mish-mash of compiled, generated and web-scraped addresses that some sellers like to characterize as '100% opt-in', then it's your name that is going to be mud when your marketing materials land in the inboxes of 50,000 people who don't want to receive them.

I've written before about opt-in lists. My position now is as then: except in a few niche markets, the likelihood of a third-party list being genuinely made up only of 'confirmed opt-in' addresses is in inverse proportion to the size of that list. I can accept that a few hundred people might check the box that says “Sure, please invite anyone who has anything to sell to fill my mailbox with ads.” A few thousand? A few tens of thousands? A hundred thousand? I'm skeptical. The bigger the list, the better the odds that your mail is going to end up with someone who doesn't want to see it. If you're really unlucky, they may even run a website that keeps a list of domains advertised by spam. And wouldn't that suck?

The release does contain one piece of very good advice: if you want a mailing list, build it yourself (and remember to follow best practices for building mailing lists).