Laura Atkins,e-mail deliverability consultant and proprietor of Word to the Wise, strongly criticized ZoomInfo’s announcement last week that the business-executive profiling firm has begun selling its list of 45 million names, address and e-mail addresses.
Her argument is worth considering:
“ZoomInfo has long been harvesting information from other sites,” she wrote. “Now, they are offering to sell their scraped and harvested list. Their only requirement is that the buyer sign an agreement to comply with CAN SPAM. And, yes, if someone is dumb enough to buy this harvested list, they should comply with CAN SPAM as sending mail to a harvested list triggers additional penalties if or when the FTC decides to go after the sender.
“Not only are ZoomInfo harvesting data, they are harvesting from ancient and obscure sources. They have no current information for me, but they managed to find an e-mail address for a job I left in 1993. They have Steve [her husband] listed as an employee of ‘postgreSQL INC’ because they harvested the postgres mailing list archives. Mickey [Chandler, another blogger criticizing the move] pointed out one of ZoomInfo’s sources is http://free-personal-ads-wanted-sex-partner-near-hays-kansas.themasterwi.... You do not even need to visit that site, just look at the URL!
“ZoomInfo’s VP and general manager claims they send e-mails to people regularly, offering them the chance to opt-out. First of all, I have never received one of these, have any of you? Secondly, some of the addresses are so old opt-outs are not relevant. Finally, unless they are monitoring their delivery, which I strongly doubt given their business model, anyone buying addresses from them is going to buy lots of dead addresses. And spamtraps. Lots of spamtraps.”
A paid advertisement recently went out to the Magilla Marketing subscriber list from ZoomInfo offering a free trial of its new list service. I would appreciate hearing from any marketer who tries it, preferably on the record, but off is OK, too. You can reach me at Ken_dot_Magill_at_penton_dot_com.
