Is it forbidden to use other people's emailadresses for promotion?

Frank,

Here is a link to the basics of the Can-Spam Act of 2003.

Contrary to what many marketers believe, it does allow for sending unsolicited email in certain circumstances. But it also requires some pre-cautions and steps be taken in order to comply with the law.

What many marketers find is that purchased email lists are not accepted for uploading by many emailing and autoresponder services.

Often, these lists for sale are made up of scraped emails from the Internet.

In addition, they can be emails that were gathered for some specific purpose but are now being sold without the email owner's permission.

Occasionally, businesses that are being sold, taken over, or that are going out of business will try to sell an email list to recoup some money.

You don't know how many times a list of emails may have been sold or typically how the emails were gathered.

Some of these lists for sale contain a majority of "dead" email addresses - from old email accounts that aren't active.

Finally, these lists tend to be very general and non-targeted. What that means is that the interests of the list are not the same - they are all other the map. So if you were to send an email offer to the list, it most likely wouldn't get very many responses since the list isn't focused on a particular niche or topic. In addition, you would probably have many list recipients complain that they didn't specifically opt-in to the list (i.e. give you permission to email them).

The bottom line is . . . don't purchase an email list as it most often won't be worth the money spent on it and by sending to the list you will make a lot of folks (who value their privacy) mad.

The best to all of you,

Steve