Can consent be transferred or inherited (e.g., list purchase)?
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You just acquired a company. Their list has 50,000 subscribers. Can you start emailing it? The short answer is no, and the longer answer involves a lot of legal exposure.
Under GDPR and CASL, consent is not transferable. When someone subscribed to Company A's newsletter, they gave permission to Company A. That permission doesn't move to Company B, regardless of how the list was acquired. The consent was specific to the original sender, the original brand, the original relationship.
Purchased lists are worse. The people on those lists never agreed to hear from you at all. Their relationship was with whoever originally collected their address. Sending to them without consent violates GDPR (which can mean substantial fines), destroys your sender reputation quickly, and lands your domain on blocklists. Spam complaint rates on purchased lists are brutal.
Corporate acquisitions are more nuanced. If you acquire a company with a subscriber list, the safe path is a re-consent campaign: notify subscribers about the new ownership, explain what changes, and give them a clear option to stay or go. Some regulators require this explicitly. It's also just honest. Subscribers who stay after that notification are genuinely yours.
There's no shortcut to a quality list. The only addresses worth having are ones where someone specifically said yes to you. If you've acquired a list and you're not sure where you stand, book a free SOS call and we'll walk through your options. We won't tell you what you want to hear, but we'll tell you what's actually true.
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