Email Appends Are NOT Opt-In Email Addresses

From Blue State Digital:

Every campaign is looking for the easiest way to meet their fundraising goals – and there are plenty of vendors here in Washington DC looking to make a buck off of those eager campaigns. Recently, that means a whole lot of campaigns are being sold on email appends: a system of matching email addresses to existing voter files or old supporter lists.

The question has come up with a few of our clients in the past week, so we thought we’d clear this up for the world:

Email appends are NOT opt-in email addresses. Blue State Digital will not allow you to send to appended email addresses through our system. This is a strict rule, and BSD can and will shut off your technology access for breaking it…

…Why are we all so strict? Simply put, it’s spam. These people didn’t ask to hear from you via email. The likelihood that an email append will mark you as spam in their inbox is exponentially higher than any other email address you have.

Read the whole post here.

Related posts on not buying email lists here and how to build your email database here.