Mailing Lists

Membership lists come from all manner of associations and organizations with permanent members. Selling such lists is a source of income for the associations and groups involved. To be sure, this category itself is a compilation, but with the special character that members of such grouping are self-selecting and have specific profiles and associate income and interest patterns.

LIST SELLERS AND SERVICERS

Direct mail is an industry of $52.2 billion in sales, it is populated by a large number of list sellers. The base of the pyramid is represented by list owners who may be businesses with customer lists, banks with credit card customers, publishers of periodicals with subscription lists—anyone, in fact, with a list of names he or she is entitled to rent or sell to others. List compilers rent or purchase such lists for retail to final users and frequently combine and create their own composite lists. Compilers, being specialists in the management of lists, typically employ staffs for the purpose of qualifying, analyzing, purging, and otherwise engineering mailing lists. They are in the business of renting lists directly to end users and supplying list brokers. The list broker is a marketing expert specializing in direct mail; his or her job is to know what lists are available and which can be deployed for the purposes of a client. Brokers work with list owners or compilers and are paid a commission for list rentals (around 20 percent of the transaction). They typically represent the final user and are thus technically "buyers." The industry also has a specialized seller, known as the list manager. Managers represent owners and promote lists to ultimate users, compilers, and brokers.

Service bureaus have emerged in this industry. They specialize in the physical management of lists on behalf of owners and compilers. These operations are computationally advanced businesses which perform data mining, enhancement, and the more routine maintenance steps of merging and purging huge lists, eliminating duplicates, and "normalizing" variant forms of the same names and addresses.

Letter shops, already mentioned, service the ultimate list user by minimally performing mailing operations as already outlined. Many also offer data processing services to ensure that the addresses used conform to U.S. Postal service regulations and that the sorting is done to achieve lowest possible postage costs.

E-Mailings and Spam

With the dramatic rise in Internet communications, e-mail rapidly came to be used for commercial solicitation. Here the mailing list transforms into a list of e-mail addresses which Web sites can capture from visitors mechanically and build into databases with a little programming effort. The volume of this new kind of mail grew so rapidly that it acquired the derogatory label of "spam." It was used and abused by organizations sending out millions of unsolicited e-mail messages selling anything from drugs to insurance to pornography. E-mail solicitation continues but has been curbed somewhat by Internet gateway providers that filter it out. E-mail solicitation has also come under government regulation.

This took the form of legislation awkwardly by cutely titled Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act—which just happens to abbreviate to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (Public Law 108-197). The law was signed in December of 2003 and took effect on January 1, 2004. It requires that senders of unsolicited commercial e-mail label their messages, but Congress did not require a standard labeling language. Such messages must carry instructions on how to opt-out of receiving such mail; the sender must also provide its actual physical address. Misleading headers and titles are prohibited. Congress authorized the Federal Trade Commissioned to establish a "do-not-mail" registry but did not require the FTC do so. CAN-SPAM also has preemptive features: it prohibits states from outlawing commercial e-mail or to require their own labeling. Since 2003 other bills have been proposed but have not been enacted. Congress clearly hesitated straddling a fence: on the one hand consumer protection, on the other the free-wheeling market in virtual space.

Paper Spam?

Curiously the "opt-out" feature required by U.S. law in electronic transmission is also available to people who receive unwanted sexually-oriented material by snail-mail. A person can obtain a Post Office form, entitled "Application for Listing and/or Prohibitory Order." It is available over the Internet (see citations). Using this form, the unhappy recipient of such mail can stop receiving such mail or gain the right to sue the sender. As for the rest of the junk mail, it will keep on coming.

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