There are also several legislative hurdles you’ll need to evaluate the list against. Two that come to mind are:
Canada’s Anti-Spam Law has a two year expiry on implied consent. If you have addresses older than that in Canada you would likely be in violation of the law. GDPR also has some rules around understanding why a business is processing your data, why they have your data, how they use it, etc... all of this beyond consent. It’s rather complex for older data. if you don’t have the right consent and proof to back it up, track the source, and user location just cleaning the list won’t matter. ~ Matt > On Nov 23, 2019, at 16:15, Rolf E. Sonneveld via mailop <mailop@mailop.org> > wrote: > > Hi, Steve, > >> On 23-11-19 20:18, Steve Atkins via mailop wrote: >> >>> On 23/11/2019 19:05, Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via mailop wrote: >>> "Rolf E. Sonneveld via mailop" <mailop@mailop.org> writes: >>> >>>> What would be a good strategy for this customer to update his list of >>>> contacts? >> >> If it's old enough that they're asking the question, and are afraid of the >> impact of even a single "Hey, still interested?" email then toss the list >> and start over. Whatever process they go through to clean it up is going to >> leave it as still a junk list. >> >> If some of it is "old" (6+ months, say) then that applies to the old >> segment. Newer email addresses are likely recoverable. >> >> If there aren't any signup or last-mailed dates on the list then it's all >> old. > > To be honest, I don't know how old the list is, but thanks for your advise, > seems a good strategy to me. > >> >>> In the olden days, one would simply write a script, using expect(1) or >>> similar, to go through the addresses, connect to the target MTAs, and do >>> an SMTP VRFY on the recipient address. Today, I suspect that most MTAs >>> will refuse to service a VRFY request. >>> >>> Anyone know if that assumption is good? >> >> You're a couple of decades out of touch with email to even consider that >> approach. >> >> More usually a list owner who is really convinced they can save a bad list >> would buy list cleaning services from one of the companies that offer them. >> They'll use a variety of approaches to categorize the email addresses on a >> list into deliverable vs not. >> >> There are relatively reputable companies who offer email address validation >> or scoring, typically aiming at real-time validation at signup and similar >> situations. These are not the companies you go to for list cleaning. >> >> They're generally pretty inaccurate, and in ethics / respect for the email >> ecosystem only a step or two removed from professional spammers. If that. > > How can I distinguish one (list cleaning services) from the other (address > validation/scoring)? Do you have some examples of reputable list cleaning > services? > > Thanks, > /rolf > > > _______________________________________________ > mailop mailing list > mailop@mailop.org > https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
