Notes on contact data, identity, and respectful outreach.
How the information behind a business email is gathered, matched, and kept accurate, and what good practice looks like for the people sending and receiving it.
How contact data works
Where it starts
Most business contact information begins as something public or volunteered: a company website, a professional profile, a conference badge, a newsletter signup. Records are compiled from many such sources.
How it's matched
Because one person can appear in dozens of sources, records are linked into a single profile. Strong matches share an exact identifier; weaker ones are inferred and carry a confidence score.
Why it decays
People change jobs, companies rebrand, inboxes close. A list that was accurate last year can be meaningfully wrong today, which is why recency matters as much as coverage.
Why privacy is built in
Laws such as CAN-SPAM, CCPA and GDPR shape what can be collected and how it may be used. Opt-outs, suppression lists and retention limits are part of the data, not an afterthought.
Glossary of identity terms
Short definitions for words that come up whenever data and marketing meet.
- First-party data
- Information a business collects directly from its own customers and visitors, purchases, signups, support conversations.
- Third-party data
- Data compiled by an outside provider from many sources and licensed to others.
- Identity graph
- A database linking the identifiers that belong to one person or household, emails, phones, addresses, devices, with a strength score on each link.
- Deterministic match
- Two records joined because they share an exact identifier, such as the same email address.
- Probabilistic match
- Records joined by inference from partial signals, name, location, behavior, and labelled with a confidence level.
- Hashed email
- An email run through a one-way function (MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256) so two parties can confirm a match without exchanging the address itself.
- Intent signal
- Evidence that someone is researching a topic now, as opposed to demographic facts about who they are.
- Hard bounce
- A permanent delivery failure, the mailbox doesn't exist. Responsible senders remove these immediately.
- Suppression list
- A permanent record of addresses that must never be contacted again, checked before every send.
Six principles for respectful business email
- i.
Say who you are
A real name, a working reply address and an honest subject line. No disguised senders.
- ii.
Be relevant to the role
Write to people whose work the message actually concerns. Fewer, better-matched sends beat volume.
- iii.
Verify before sending
Check that addresses exist and are current. Bounces hurt everyone who shares the mail stream.
- iv.
Keep it short and plain
A few sentences, minimal links, no tracking tricks. Readers should be able to judge it in seconds.
- v.
Make leaving easy
Every message should offer a clear, one-step way to opt out, a reply or a single link.
- vi.
Honor it quickly
Opt-outs belong on a suppression list right away. U.S. law allows ten business days; good practice is sooner.
How to check a sender
Three DNS records let mail providers confirm that a message really came from the domain it claims. Most email clients show the result under "show original" or "message details."
Lists the servers allowed to send mail for a domain. Mail from anywhere else fails.
A cryptographic signature proving the message wasn't altered after it left the sender.
Tells receiving servers what to do when SPF or DKIM fails, and reports abuse back to the domain owner.
If all three pass and the domain has a working website, the sender is at least who they say they are. Whether the message is welcome is your call, and you can always ask to be removed.
Accurate data, clear identity, and an easy way out, that's what makes email worth receiving.
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