An ethical question and a practical problem

Ian Pritchard · 07-23-2009, 01:53 PM

Hello everyone. Here's something that I imagine may have been up on here a number of times before but I don't see anything at the moment.

Here's the the thing...

I have some guys in India currently scraping the contact details from the 'find a member pages' of a trade association website for me. To start with 10,000 unique contacts out of a total of 57/8k. It's all public data, just takes a lot of repetitive work to get the info and drop it into a spreadsheet. As far as I know, there is nothing dodgy about using this mehtod to get the contact details.

In a week or so I'll have a list of 10,000 of which approx 70% have email addresses (including old ones and just plain wrong ones).

The intention is to send a targeted, relevent email out to them offerring them the chance to earn some money for referring the odd customer to me. To confirm their possible interest they will need to click on an aweber link - which takes them to a 'better' list and leads them to a free membership site that will have some useful stuff for them.

All my contact details would be on the original email including my address and a one-click unsubscribe. I have no problem with the ethics of it although some might. But, is it Spam?

The practical problem -- does anyone have any idea how to send out this many emails (7k) automatically? Are there any services out there that will let you import a list and blast it out once or twice a week for five or six weeks? Or am I stuck with sending out 99 at a time (200 max an hour) from my current ISP service?

Sorry to bang on like this, but I really want to get it as right as I can from the get go.

You comments and suggestions would be very welcome indeed. Is there anything I should be thinking about?

Best wishes all, Ian Pritchard

07-23-2009, 01:53 PM	#1
Ian Pritchard Warrior Member Join Date: Aug 2007 Location: , , United Kingdom. Posts: 2 Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts	An ethical question and a practical problem Hello everyone. Here's something that I imagine may have been up on here a number of times before but I don't see anything at the moment. Here's the the thing... I have some guys in India currently scraping the contact details from the 'find a member pages' of a trade association website for me. To start with 10,000 unique contacts out of a total of 57/8k. It's all public data, just takes a lot of repetitive work to get the info and drop it into a spreadsheet. As far as I know, there is nothing dodgy about using this mehtod to get the contact details. In a week or so I'll have a list of 10,000 of which approx 70% have email addresses (including old ones and just plain wrong ones). The intention is to send a targeted, relevent email out to them offerring them the chance to earn some money for referring the odd customer to me. To confirm their possible interest they will need to click on an aweber link - which takes them to a 'better' list and leads them to a free membership site that will have some useful stuff for them. All my contact details would be on the original email including my address and a one-click unsubscribe. I have no problem with the ethics of it although some might. But, is it Spam? The practical problem -- does anyone have any idea how to send out this many emails (7k) automatically? Are there any services out there that will let you import a list and blast it out once or twice a week for five or six weeks? Or am I stuck with sending out 99 at a time (200 max an hour) from my current ISP service? Sorry to bang on like this, but I really want to get it as right as I can from the get go. You comments and suggestions would be very welcome indeed. Is there anything I should be thinking about? Best wishes all, Ian Pritchard
	Ian C Pritchard