Is it legal to send mass email to all my contacts that I got over time on craigslist.

If the company you are selling the leads to will not be using the email addresses to initiate an electronic mailing (before that company specifically gets consent from the customer to email them, such as over the phone), then you can include the email addresses. The law is in place to prevent email addresses from being sold to other companies who then spam those emails, never having been given the address by the person they are spamming.

Basically, you cannot get consent for another company. Even if your customer says it is okay for you to sell their email address to another company, you cannot legally do it. The law is greater than any contract you enter into with another company or a customer. The other company has to get consent from the customer directly, forming their own contract with that customer, and you need to be very sure that they will do so because you can end up in trouble if the company that you sell customer information to does not follow the law.

Given your situation, not providing email addresses is the safest route to take as you cannot be 100% sure of actions the company you sell customer information to will take.

 

After reading the can-spam act and talking with you I think I am just going to leave the emails out....lol. Has anybody ever done this before and if I wasted my time sending 5,000 emails and set up a website for it do you think I will get a decent turn around on people actually purchasing in for $20. I am just selling a get rich ebook essentially

 

And obviously I would have to get a business license and a merchant account, right?

 

If you can get paid by the company for just name and phone number, I would play it safe and keep the email addresses. You can send your own emails out, and the "get rich" niche has no shortage of products and affiliate programs that you can promote on your own. In fact, if you have a naturally built list, I think quite a few would agree that you want to guard that list and use it yourself. A naturally built list that you take care of can pay off a lot over time for you, but if you start selling it and they start getting offers from all over the place, it increases the overall resistance they have to spam.

As for the business license and merchant account:

Business License: US law says you can do business under your own name. No license or anything like that. You might want to get a DBA ("Doing Business As", usually very cheap, issued at your local county clerk's office) if you want to be able to do business under another name and maintain some privacy.

Now under local law, you may have to do some research. Where I live no local laws require extras for those who are self-employed and operate from home (no storefront), but some areas in the US may have special requirements for doing business in their area, so check locally to find out. Start with the business sections of your state website, county website, city website, and your local Chamber of Commerce website.

Merchant Account: PayPal is the way most go. It is just plain easy, cheap in terms of a merchant account, and lets you accept credit cards. There are quite a few scripts out there that will help with auto-delivery after payment so you can run "hands-off". You can run into some areas of the world not having their cards accepted by PayPal but the major consumer countries are accepted.