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I'm not a lawyer and don't know the intricacies of the CAN-SPAM Act, but I think one provision is that you can't contact people via harvested emails gathered by bots/scripts.

But this is done on mturk manually by people?

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That's correct, we're not bulk harvesting emails by any means. We use google news api to find blogs, and articles written about your niche based on search terms provided. We then research those blogs manually with real people using amazon mturk for crowd sourcing. We then provide you with the blogs, articles, and information about the author so you can begin interacting with them.. Reading their blogs, following them on social media, and maybe pitching them.

Right, they automated the manual process of gathering email... which I think is still automation?

Hmmm, like I said I don't know the legal specifics, but if you scrape a site constantly, that puts a load on a server and has consequences. If you manually go to a site and find an email address that is publicly given for a reason, it's there because someone is willing to start a conversation about something.

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