Mass Emails

Spam is unsolicited email. sending emails to anyone who did not give you their permission is considered as spam.
and you heard right.
purchasing email lists is not illegal. however, you will want to be extremely careful when purchasing list.

I have been monetizing purchased data for over 16 years.

You can buy data, where the users have given permission to receive messages from third parties. Mailing this data is completely can-spam compliant.

Since spamming is based on whether you had permission or not to mail the recipient, technically it's not spamming.

The data in the industry is referred to as third party data.

The data is is almost always going to be much lower quality than a targeted list you build yourself. But this is really irrelevant, because it is much cheaper and scalable than building your own lists. However, as long as you are segmenting the openers / clickers and removing the unresponsive users. You can essentially convert the data from quantity to quality.

So many people say that buying lists /data doesn't work. That simply because they don't know how to monetize data. Which is understandable, because most all information that exists is all about mainstream strategies to build your own list.

There is a lot that goes into, but it can be extremely profitable. Everyone that I know that is in the business and knows what they are doing, does 6-7 figures. While that is a huge range, much comes down to ones ability to scale and effectively manage/build the infrastructure needed to scale.

When you craft emails tailored to your audience needs it isn't spamming. But doing so is gonna require research using o
Polls and surveys data as a means to identify products and services your list needs

To piggy back off of what sendizo is saying about emails .It is also considered spam when you offer products services that are irrelevant to their needs

There is a post about this in here every week.
Sure, sending unsolicited email is frowned upon by many, but its very lucrative if you do it right.
Read the can spam act, that will let you know if what you are doing is ok or not. Its pretty easy to be compliant with the laws in the usa. Canada is a different story.
Also, spamming really more refers to sending emails through hijacked computers rather then sending bulk high volume email, just sayin'

Buying a list is one thing , but if you dont clean your database before sending, you risk blacklisting your whole IP range. Get your data cleaned from bad emails, traps, complainers. We always do that for our clients before launching their campaigns

If your looking for SMTP let me know we offer 10k free relays per month

I've also been email marketing for over 6 years can can help you get setup.