Guys,
I wouldn't call this a generous drop actually because the list data is very old. Which means this data will contain a high number of bounces, addresses with Bad MX status, catch-all's and spam traps. For those with a system that automatically removes bounces it still wont get rid of the catch-alls and traps.
I noticed someone ran 50 records and they all bounced! Its well possible that one could test 100k records and they all fail the same. (Which would be small relative to the size of this delivery) So however tempting - to make any use of this data, these records will have to be cleaned, and this will have a significant cost!
Most big mailers wouldn't bother with a data package older than a few months because of the cleaning costs and the possible impact missed bad records could have on their future deliverability. Once you get your system to the point that you are consistently inboxing on the public ISPs like gmail, hotmail, etc. is like being on a golden road. Where one has to ignore all of the tempting street signs that might veer them into the mud...
As an example, the file email-37.zip contains a file called 3.txt containing over 150k records. A good 40% of this batch are designated from an ISP with a TLD called netcom.com. Which if you type into your address bar will show as a bad address. So by itself, this one file indicates one heck of a large package of observably bad email records. Could be wrong, but it looks like the commercial emails were just scraped from the web and do not look to be of great value.
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