Welcome to the Murky World of E-mail List Sales

Jack Love was shocked when clients told him another firm had offered them his customer list. But his mood quickly turned to anger.

A firm called EmailAppenders had sent e-mail messages to his customers, pitching the Internet Retailer list of conference attendees. They started in the summer, and hit again in the fall.

There was one problem, says Love, the president of Vertical Web Media, which owns the conference: Internet Retailer doesn’t let those names out of its sight.