Part of the question here is also, "What did you promise (implicitly or explicitly) when you got those email addresses?" That's really where it becomes an ethics issue. Our data gets sold every day.

Another question is, "Did everyone get paid?" He did the right thing and saw to it that everyone got made whole. If the business goes into bankruptcy and some creditors are not being made whole, it's much harder to not sell the email list if you can do so legally.

It's during tough times that you see what people's ethics really are. Great job by the OP addressing some of these.