Should you buy an influencer email list?

Someone has to assemble a list of creators' emails, and there are only a few ways to do it. Ask a seller which of these they used, address by address. If they can't tell you, that is the answer.

Copied in bulk from profiles

Software reads bios, channel descriptions and link pages across thousands of accounts and keeps anything shaped like an email. Some of those are real business addresses. Others are old, belong to a manager the creator has since left, or were never meant for brands.

Guessed from patterns

A name and a domain go in; firstname@, hello@ and contact@ come out, kept if the mail server doesn't reject them outright. The creator never published those addresses, so a message to one lands in an inbox they never offered for business.

Resold from other lists

Lists are merged, relabelled and sold again. Each round loses the record of where an address came from and when it was last true.

A creator's contact details are a snapshot of a career that keeps moving. Creators sign with a manager and route deals through them, leave that manager, start a new address when the old one fills with spam, rename their account or stop posting altogether. None of that updates a file you bought.

A list rarely says when each address was collected. A profile you open today is current today. That is the whole argument in miniature: the creator's own page is the source, and the list is a copy of it of unknown age.

Lists are sorted by a niche tag and a follower count. Neither tells you whether the creator's audience is your customer, whether they still post, or whether their followers are real. To know that you still have to open each profile, read recent posts, check engagement and look for signs of bought followers.

By the time you've done that for a creator, you've seen their bio and their link page, which is where their business address is. The list saved you nothing on the creators worth contacting, and handed you thousands you shouldn't contact.

Mailbox providers judge senders by how recipients react. A bought list brings two things that count against you: bounces, from addresses that no longer exist, and spam complaints, from people who never expected to hear from you. Gmail and Yahoo are direct about it:

• Gmail's email sender guidelines say "Don't purchase email addresses from other companies." They ask senders to keep the spam rate reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%, and warn that when recipients mark your messages as spam, your future messages to them will be marked as spam too.
• Yahoo's sender best practices say "Don't purchase mailing lists", and ask senders to watch hard and soft bounces and to remove invalid recipients promptly.

If you send from your main domain, the reputation you spend is the one your order confirmations, invoices and password resets rely on. A campaign that gets no replies costs you a week. A campaign that teaches mailbox providers to distrust your domain costs you every email after it.

A creator who writes "business enquiries" in their bio is inviting a particular kind of message: from someone who has looked at their work and has a reason to write. They are not agreeing to be bought, sold and mail-merged by people who haven't.

It shows, too. Emails from bought lists get the creator's name wrong, pitch skincare to a cycling channel, or quote a follower count from two years ago. The creator doesn't just ignore that brand. They learn to skim past every pitch that looks like it, including the good ones.

This isn't legal advice, and the rules depend on where you and the creators are. Two points are worth knowing before you buy anything:

• A list of named people's emails is personal data. Under the UK GDPR, if you get someone's personal data from a third party, you have to tell them where it came from. The ICO's guidance on what privacy information to provide asks you to name the source as specifically as you can, and its page on the right to be informed sets the timing: within a reasonable period, and no later than one month.
• In the US, commercial email has its own rules. The FTC's CAN-SPAM compliance guide sets out what every commercial email must include, such as a way to opt out that you honour within 10 business days, and notes that the law makes no exception for business-to-business email.

Find the address each creator publishes, one creator at a time, and write to them as someone who has seen their work. It's slower per creator and faster per reply.

1. Shortlist first. Decide who fits before you look for any address, so you only look for the ones you'll write to.
2. Look where they publish it. Bios, channel descriptions, link-in-bio pages and the contact page of their own site. Our guides to finding a YouTuber's email, a TikToker's email and an Instagram creator's email go through each place.
3. If there's no address, respect that. Use the form, manager or message route they do publish, or leave them be. Never guess one from a name pattern.
4. Write one email to one creator. Mention something specific they made, state your offer plainly, and say you won't follow up if it isn't a fit.
5. Keep a do-not-contact column. Anyone who says no or asks you to stop goes in it, and stays there.

We built Nakodo around the published address because we think it's the only one worth writing to. Nakodo reads what creators publish for business: bios, descriptions, link-in-bio pages and the contact pages of their own sites. It never guesses an address. On Instagram and TikTok it keeps an address only if it's on the creator's own domain, a personal mail provider, or a domain that looks like the creator's name.

Creators' addresses are never shown, sold or exported to brands, so there is no list to take away. Nakodo writes to each creator on the brand's behalf, and the brand gets the address only when the creator says yes and Nakodo introduces them. Every email has a one-click way to stop, and opted-out or bounced addresses are never emailed through Nakodo again. The details are on how Nakodo works.