What is the best way or company for cleaning a 100,000+ e-mail mailing list?

Question

We have an old e-mail mailing list that we acquired when we purchased a new company and want to clean it before we go about sending out a new e-mail marketing campaign. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

There isn;t. the only way to determien if the addresses are still valid is by sending your marketing material and removing hard bounces.

Answer 2

I get a few spam messages but most go to my bulk mail box in Yahoo. I just delete them. I never take any action on the ones that make it to my regular Yahoo mail. I simply delete them. Most are family fortune scams with a few with a body building theme. The only activity in my Yahoo mail is a few discussion groups and personal friends. I suspect the spam originated by mining discussion group membership lists but no way to confirm this. The number of spam messages has remained at no more than three or four a day for years. I'm not going to risk my low profile by taking action over that. I think that blocking confirms that there is a person at that address and therefore a candidate for more spam. In other words, it is counterproductive.

Answer 3

Hello,



Although mailing list services exist that will attempt to verify your list for you the truth of the matter is that many mail servers do not accurately report if an email address is valid or not. The only way to know for sure is to send an actual e-mail and wait for a bounce message to be returned if the account does not exist. The best thing to do is make sure that you are using a mailing list program such as EZMLM that will automatically monitor the bounce messages for you and remove e-mail addresses from the mailing list that are not valid or are having other delivery problems such as your mails to them being rejected as spam. The goal is to only send emails to addresses that exist and will not get your blacklisted as being a spammer.



-Raymond

Answer 4

Actually, there are a lot of companies that do email verification. They have large lists of people with varying amounts of data on them, and they can validate the email against that for you. It isn't cheap though. Look for Address Validation services.



There are also some good email marketing companies that will work with you to systematically send out the emails so that you don't get blacklisted for spam. I've worked with FluencyMedia in the past, and they have a great program for this. Some of the bigger email marketing companies won't even touch you if you list isn't clean to begin with.



One of the things you need to keep in mind is that opt-in only lasts for a short time (6-18 months at the most). So, if this list is older than 18 months, chances are their opt-in as expired, and if you email them you will be spamming. The only way to contact them safely is to send them a message something like: "We haven't heard from you in a while, would you like to stay on our email list?"



Be careful, in addition to possible fines from CANN-SPAM, you could also get blacklisted but spam blocking companies and ISPs, and that is a MAJOR pain to remove.