Oh i bet he is. It wouldn't be abnormal for some folks to want to take out his servers either among other things. Reason being is that the world of email list buying (which this essentially is) is almost Dark Web type territory.
I found this fairly recent post over on hubspot as to why you shouldn't buy email lists. Whether or not someone is buying it to add to their database or renting it from someone else. ie. Conquest Campaigns. These vendors for the most part are banking on the fact that you are a dumb automotive person and believe you can actually buy people this way.
Why You Shouldn't Buy Email Lists
Reputable email marketing vendors don't let you send emails to lists you've bought.
If you're using
email marketing software now or plan to in the future, you'll find that reputable companies will insist that you use opt-in email lists. You might be saying, "I'll just use a non-reputable email marketing vendor." Alas, ESPs on
shared IP addresses that don't require customers to use opt-in email lists typically suffer poor deliverability. Why? One customer's ill-gotten email address list can poison the deliverability of the other customers on that shared IP address. You're going to want to hitch your wagon to the light side of the email marketing force if you want your emails to actually get into inboxes.
Good email address lists aren't for sale.
Unless your company is in the middle of some M&A action, you're not going to come across high quality email lists you can purchase. If it's for sale, it means that the email addresses on it have already been ripped to shreds by all the other people who have purchased that list and emailed the people on it. Any email addresses that once had value have since been spammed to the ends of the earth.
If someone actually had a good email list, they'd keep it to themselves because they don't want to see the value of those email addresses diminished by letting other people get their hands on it. Think about it -- would you sell or share the email addresses of those who have voluntarily opted in to receive email from you? I didn't think so.
People on a purchased or rented list don't actually know you.
I referenced this earlier, but it's worth going into some more detail on this subject. Rented and purchased lists are sometimes scraped from other websites which, I think we can all agree, is a dirty way to acquire email marketing contacts. But let's say they're not scraped and are acquired through considerably less sketchy means -- list purchase and rental companies may tout that those lists are opt-in. Sounds great, right?
Not really, because it means that the contacts have opted to receive emails from, say, the list-purchasing company -- not
your company. Even if the opt-in process includes language like, "Opt in to receive information from us, or offers from other companies we think you might enjoy," the fact is that the recipient has never heard of your company, and does not remember opting in to receive emails from you. That means there's a really good chance a lot of the recipients will mark you as "Spam" because they don't recognize you or remember opting in to communications from you ... which takes us to our next point.
Your email deliverability and IP reputation will be harmed.
Did you know that there are organizations dedicated to combating email spam? Thank goodness, right? They set up a little thing called a honeypot, which is a planted email address that, when harvested and emailed, identifies the sender as a spammer. Similarly, things called spam traps can be created to identify spammy activity; they are set up when an email address yields a hard bounce because it is old or no longer valid, but still receives consistent traffic. Fishy, eh? As a result, the email address turns into a spam trap that stops returning the hard bounce notice, and instead accepts the message and reports the sender as a spammer.
If you purchase a list, you have no way of confirming how often those email addresses have been emailed, whether the email addresses on that list have been scrubbed for hard bounces to prevent identifying you as a spammer, or from where those email addresses originated. Are you really willing to risk not only your email deliverability, but also the reputation of your IP address and your company? Even if you find the light after purchasing or renting email lists and decide to only email those who have opted in with your company, it will take you months (or maybe years) to
get your Sender Score up and rebuild the reputation of your IP.
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/...chasing-Email-Lists-Is-Always-a-Bad-Idea.aspx
