[WalterSear]

That depends on your metric of 'work'. By the same metric, buying email lists from spammers also 'works'.

[zombio]

How does getting people to voluntarily sign up to receive emails about a topic that interests them compare AT ALL to buying scraped emails?

[Ciotti]

You are wrong, and I don't mean to sound insulting but it seems like you are making these comments on theory and not on experience.

I have multiple sites with pop-ups that see outstanding open and click-through rates, it's not even close to the same thing as buying an email list (which doesn't work, as you pointed out).