The List of List Sellers

About this paper

I publish [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected] because I want people to be able to reach me. That is a deliberate choice and I would make it again. The cost of it arrives as a very specific genre of mail: somebody writes to offer me the attendee database for a conference I have never attended, in an industry I do not work in, priced on request. The list “includes” Dental Practice Owners, or Meteorologists, or Emergency Response Managers. Data fields are enumerated. Would I like counts and pricing?

This paper is what happened when I stopped deleting them and started reading them as a corpus. Twenty-six distinct senders, thirty-three messages, October 2024 through August 2026. Seventeen distinct events being resold. Seventeen of the twenty-six writing from freemail addresses that follow one pattern — a plausible human name with a business word welded onto the local part — seventeen times out of seventeen. Nine writing from single-purpose domains that announce the business in the second-level label. Nineteen of the twenty-six aimed at my newest published address rather than the one that has been up for sixteen years, which tells you the acquisition is current rather than some ancient harvest still in circulation.

The core observation is the one I did not expect to be interesting: the people selling contact data are themselves reachable contact data. They have names, self-declared job titles — “Trade Show & Events Data Specialist” is real, from a real signature block — employers, domains, and a follow-up cadence. Everything they sell about other people, they emit about themselves, directly to the person they are pitching.

So I built the list, and it ships with this paper as a CSV. It is a joke and I will not pretend otherwise. It is also the best-provenanced contact file I have ever handled, for a reason that no broker who has written to me can claim about their own product: every person on it initiated contact with the publisher, and I can show the receipt for every row. That gap — between a dataset and an assertion — is the actual argument here, and it is the same discipline I apply when scoring an API provider. A claim is not evidence. You go and look.

The paper covers the five-move template every one of these messages runs, the address and domain patterns that make the genre machine-detectable without a blocklist, why the reply is the product being bought rather than the list, the provenance question the business is constructed to never answer, and a practical section on handling this mail if you would rather just make it stop — including why replying, which I am doing deliberately, is the wrong move for everybody else.

It also carries one open experiment. Every sender in the corpus now gets a reply offering them this exact file. Their inbound is automated. If any part of that stack evaluates an inbound commercial offer on its merits, it will find a well-specified, fairly-priced, correctly-provenanced dataset precisely on-topic for its operator’s business. I do not know what happens. That is why the reply goes out, and I will report what comes back in a future version.

What's inside

1. What is actually in the corpus — 26 senders, 33 messages, 17 events
2. The address patterns: single-purpose domains and firstname.lastname.brandword@
3. The anatomy of the pitch, in five moves
4. Why the reply is the product, not the list
5. The provenance question, which is the whole point
6. What this says about the agentic layer — and the open experiment
7. How to handle this mail, if you are not going to make a product out of it
8. The file: sixteen columns, and a removal address that is honored

What you get for $25.00