What can I do with all these emails?

[Whole Paradigm]

I've been toying around with learning how to do some coding and I just finished building an "email extractor/ripper" the other day and ran it today.

Works perfectly but I can't imagine that there are many ethical/legal ways I can use this immense list of emails. Unless of course anyone here knows how I could use the list.

I did read that I could send out marketing to them and avoid spam laws if I insert "ADV" in the header and allow an "opt out" but I'm still pretty unsure.

Looking for any and all ideas and suggestions on how I could use these emails and not be an jerk/criminal about it.


All the best,

Cory

 

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[houseofcards]

Haha very nice. If its all legal I don't know why not use those emails.....something

 

[intrigue]

I think you need to make a clear "unsubscribe" option in your e-mail to avoid any real problems.

Besides what you slapped together, another great tool for scraping e-mails is scrapebox.

 

[Whole Paradigm]

So as long as I put an unsubscribe button I can mass email these people? Even though they haven't dealt with me in the past or initiated anything with me to begin with?

I just don't want to be arrested or fined for "spamming"

 

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[UberTrader]

So as long as I put an unsubscribe button I can mass email these people? Even though they haven't dealt with me in the past or initiated anything with me to begin with?

I just don't want to be arrested or fined for "spamming"

Who was the last person in America to get arrested for spamming?

 

[Whole Paradigm]

Plenty of examples here https://www.google.com/#hl=en&sclie....,cf.osb&fp=fea88144d3bdc45d&biw=1279&bih=567

 

[wildambitions]

I would mark you as a Spammer. But that is not to say that people do not do this or use this tactic. I don't personally use this tactic not would I condone it's use. Only you can decide your actions. Do your due diligence on what is legal and what is not, and do the thing that is right for you.

 

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[Whole Paradigm]

Wild,

Thank you for your input. I'll continue to look into other things I could do.

 

[danoodle]

I suppose if you wanted to be really shady you could use multiple proxies and an offshore email account to try and hide your identity. Do you know the demographics at all or is it completely random? You could maybe send them to a landing page of some sort or an affiliate marketing link. Ideally if you knew the demographics you could at least send them a targeted offer...

 

[Whole Paradigm]

Well I got a few thousand emails running the program through Facebook and another few thousand by searching through Twitter. So I suppose I know nothing of them other than being a predominately younger and somewhat tech savvy crowd. Even that may be a stretch...

 

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[danoodle]

You should send the emails with the subject: Hey I just met you, and this is crazy....

I bet the open rate would be near 100%

 

[Whole Paradigm]

"Hey I just met you, and this is crazy! I'm on bath-salts and your face looks tasty!"

In all seriousness, the purpose of this was to get away from being shady, unethical, etc. I'm probably just going to pat myself on the back for creating something cool and trash it. There really is no way I can utilize the emails.

 

[townhaus]

Rent/sell the list to someone who has use for them

 

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[futhey]

Not worth it. Opt-in/Opt-out is the only legal way to go in the US. The only way I would even approach this is to claim you paid for the list from a third party and your first email be a notice to opt-out, or "Thank you for subscribing/opting in".

I've lost several linux boxes to spammers. Networks in the US don't like to take risks with being labelled spam and blacklisted.

 

[DeletedUser397]

I'd use iContact or another newsletter service in case you get blacklisted. The last job I had, we used to send out mass emails to 100k+ people at once, and even though they signed up themselves for our newsletters, we still got people marking us as spam or we would get blocked by ISPs, etc. So, yes, it's better if they initially opt-in, but it's still legal to send them email due to the fact that you could have purchased the list from a partner business, etc.

The best way to do it is to not appear like spam. And as a result, your list is worthless if it's not targetted. The company I work for now has a system that mines email addresses but it can also mine the approximate age, location, occupation, interests and various other details based on social networking API's, public directories, and so on... and it can do it all in real-time. They did a demo a few months ago and it was very impressive.

So if you could create some sort of targetting, then you could reach out to these people not necessarily via email, but via other channels, such as social media and tie that into your email campaigns. Don't try to sell something right off the bat. Maybe you could improve your scraping system to do something with more targetting, and sell a subscription to advertisers or sell bulk lists?

 

[Kung Fu Steve]

The only way I see you could make money with that list is by selling it to spammers.

What I've learned in e-mail marketing is that is money is not in BIG lists, it's in quality
lists. The money is made through the relationship that you build with your clients
through e-mail. If you contact them without permission you have just violated that
trust instantly - you e-raped the hell outta them. That's why the majority of people
use double opt-ins because they are saying "are you SUUURRREEE???" ... then you can
erape them...

If you are looking to build a list for any business you want very targeted demographics,
very interested people, and a way that you can help them immediately.

 

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[Whole Paradigm]

Thank you all for the feedback and input. Much appreciated