What are the potential risks of sending emails to addresses scraped from public websites?

Key findings

• Unsolicited contact: Addresses found on public websites are typically for customer contact, not for receiving unsolicited commercial messages (spam), regardless of how they are collected or labelled (e.g., "foraged").
• Spam classification: Email service providers (ESPs) and anti-spam organizations consider scraped email lists to be high-risk, frequently resulting in emails being blocked or domains blacklisted. This practice is often categorized as spamming, even if framed as cold outreach.
• Reputational damage: Using scraped lists can harm your sender reputation, which is crucial for email deliverability. High complaint rates can lead to your domain or IP being flagged by major mailbox providers like Google and Microsoft, affecting all future email campaigns from that sender.
• Blocklisting: Organizations may block your emails directly, or you may end up on broader business blocklists (blacklists). This can lead to your emails consistently landing in spam folders or being rejected outright.

Key considerations

• Consent is paramount: Even for B2B communications, explicit consent is generally required by laws such as GDPR and CAN-SPAM. Sending to scraped addresses without confirmed opt-in violates these regulations and can lead to legal penalties and fines. More on that can be found in a guide to email scraping and CAN-SPAM.
• Impact on legitimate mail: If you use the same sending domain for scraped lists as for legitimate communications, the negative impact on your sender reputation will affect all your email, not just the marketing campaigns. This can damage critical operational emails.
• Engagement versus filtering: While engagement metrics are key for consumer email, business filters primarily focus on keeping mail useful for the business. Unsolicited mail, regardless of a marketer's intent, is often deemed unuseful and therefore spam, leading to blocks.
• Alternative strategies: Instead of scraping, focus on building an opted-in list through ethical methods like content marketing, webinars, and direct engagement with potential leads. This ensures higher quality recipients and better long-term deliverability. You can read more about email scraping alternatives.

Key opinions

• High risk of spam classification: Marketers frequently note that sending to scraped addresses is almost universally flagged as spam by email providers. These addresses are not opt-in and represent a violation of recipient expectations.
• Negative impact on sender reputation: The immediate consequence is often a decline in sender reputation. This means legitimate emails from the same domain or IP address are more likely to be filtered to spam folders or rejected, even if they are transactional messages.
• Legal and compliance issues: Many marketers are aware that scraping emails without consent can lead to legal repercussions under anti-spam laws like CAN-SPAM and GDPR, resulting in fines and legal actions.
• Poor engagement metrics: Scraped lists typically have low open and click-through rates and high bounce rates, as recipients haven't opted in and may not be interested. This poor engagement further signals negative behavior to mailbox providers.

Key considerations

• Quality over quantity: A smaller list of genuinely interested, opted-in subscribers is far more valuable than a large list of scraped addresses. Quality lists yield better deliverability and ROI.
• Long-term brand damage: Repeated spamming can lead to lasting damage to your brand reputation, not just your email deliverability. This can result in loss of customer trust and negative public perception.
• Avoiding blocklists: Marketers should focus on maintaining a clean list to avoid common blocklists and blacklists. Regularly monitoring your sender reputation and adhering to best practices is vital to avoid deliverability issues. Read more on how to prevent your email from ending up on a blacklist.
• Ethical lead generation: Invest in ethical lead generation strategies that focus on obtaining explicit consent, such as content downloads, sign-up forms, and events. These methods build a foundation for sustainable and effective email marketing. You can explore a guide on ethical web scraping practices.

Key opinions

• Scraping is spamming: Experts unequivocally state that scraping addresses from websites is a form of spamming, irrespective of how the sender labels the activity (e.g., prospecting or outreach).
• Direct blocking and filtering: Recipients and email providers (like Google and Office 365) can and will actively block domains that send unsolicited mail. These actions feed into broader business filters and blocklists (or blacklists), affecting deliverability across the board.
• Reputation spillover: A critical risk highlighted is that if the sending domain is shared with other legitimate organizational mail, the negative reputation from spamming will impact all email sent from that domain, not just the campaigns using scraped lists.
• Business filter logic: Unlike consumer filters which might consider engagement, business filters are primarily concerned with the utility of incoming mail for the business. Unsolicited marketing email is generally seen as unuseful and is thus filtered or blocked.

Key considerations

• Active blocking by recipients: Some organizations, exasperated by unsolicited emails, actively block senders of scraped addresses. This aggressive stance means that even potential future customers might be permanently inaccessible if their initial contact is perceived as spam.
• Manual reviews by ESPs: Publicly available email addresses, if used for spamming, can serve as flags for ESPs to manually review customer accounts, potentially leading to stricter sending restrictions or account suspension.
• Importance of consent: The only truly safe and effective way to send email is through confirmed opt-in. This builds a foundation of trust and compliance, ensuring higher inbox placement rates and avoiding potential pitfalls like spam complaints.
• Strategic domain management: Organizations with multiple communication teams should centralize email sending policies or consider separate domains for different types of outreach if some teams insist on riskier practices. This can help mitigate broad deliverability issues.

Key findings

• Legal prohibitions: Many jurisdictions have explicit laws (e.g., CAN-SPAM Act in the U.S., GDPR in the EU) that prohibit or severely restrict sending unsolicited commercial emails to addresses obtained without consent, including those scraped from public sources. Violations can lead to significant fines.
• Definition of spam: Technical documentation from anti-spam organizations and internet service providers (ISPs) defines unsolicited bulk email (UBE) or unsolicited commercial email (UCE) as spam. Addresses acquired via scraping fall squarely into this category, regardless of content or perceived intent.
• Risk of spam traps: Publicly available email addresses, especially generic ones (info@, sales@), are often converted into spam traps. Hitting these traps immediately identifies a sender as a spambot or irresponsible sender, leading to rapid blacklisting.
• Impact on sender reputation: Mailbox providers heavily weigh sender reputation metrics, including spam complaint rates and bounce rates. Sending to scraped lists invariably increases these negative metrics, signaling to receiving servers that your mail is undesirable and leading to blocks or bulk folder delivery. A practical guide to understanding your email domain reputation can provide more insights.

Key considerations

• Compliance frameworks: Adhering to relevant email marketing laws and privacy regulations (like CAN-SPAM, GDPR) is non-negotiable for sustainable email programs. Scraped lists inherently carry compliance risks.
• IP and domain reputation: Documentation from email infrastructure providers confirms that sending to non-permissioned lists harms both IP and domain reputation. This can lead to your emails being quarantined or rejected by a wide array of receiving servers globally.
• Ethical data acquisition: Best practice documentation consistently advocates for consent-based email list building. This ensures that recipients genuinely want to receive your communications, leading to higher engagement and better deliverability outcomes. Reviewing resources on ethical web data benchmark practices is recommended.
• Automated filtering systems: Modern email systems employ sophisticated algorithms to detect and block spam. Scraped lists often contain patterns that these systems are designed to identify, making successful delivery highly unlikely and quickly leading to sender penalties.