I am trying to understand the economics and motives of the parties to this deal to understand the context and what is going on. Who is on the other side of the emails? Is there a non-disclosure agreement? Was there any expectation of privacy of the other person in these emails? Are they form emails? Are they basically trying to spy on people or are they basically trying to buy a set of forms to use for themselves or is there some other purpose driving this deal?

@ohwilleke I suspect they are trying to assemble a list of verified (at least one reply) email addresses for spam purposes.

By "emails", do you mean the email address ([email protected]) or the actual email, subject, body, attachements and all? You said you had a "client", I assume that means you are not a private person but in business, is that correct? Are you in a country or doing business with people to whom the GDPR applies?

Yes, I mean the actual email, not just addresses. I am a freelancer who works via Upwork. A client I had a contract with for a different job (voice recording), made me this offer 0.40 USD per email. The offer came via a private message.

I can give you all my spam e-mails and you can sell them. I'd be very surprised if anyone asserted copyright on those.

@DonQuiKong Excellent idea. But I'd want $0.20 from the OP since she's getting $0.40 for them. I have a folder named "Stupid" that has hundreds of them.

They only wanted email with at least one reply so no spam emails.

I get dozens of e-mails per day, counting only those that get past my spam filters. At $0.40 per e-mail, that would amount to thousands of dollars for just one year of e-mails. Issues of legality aside, this is far too generous to believe.

There's datasets of emails available, such as the Enron dataset with 500k messages. It must be quite a big research project if your buyer needs more... I'd be highly suspicious of this offer.

As always, "where" this is happening matters. The laws on this topic differ from one country to another and from one U.S. state to another.

I wonder if this could be for some sort of fine tuning or training of some specific AI large language model to the type of business/correspondence that you do.

$0.40 per email is a suspiciously high offer for email contents. It is hard to believe that someone would offer that much for mere random emails. There has to be more context to this, something about your emails specifically that makes them so valuable, and that context is very probably relevant to the legal question that you are trying to ask here. (You may have heard the email addresses go for as high as $0.60, but you only get that rate for a bulk of unique addresses that been validated and are of a certain quality. )

You won't be getting any money. You'll turn over the emails, the client will "verify how much they have to pay you", vanish with your data and quite possibly steal some valuable accounts like Steam or Amazon (that you can recover with old receipts).

I'm not an expert in law at all, which is why I'm only commenting. I did want two concepts to be brought up based on my experience in IT. First, publicly traded companies in the United States are subject to a law referred to as "Sarbanes-Oxley", which regulates the data integrity of certain information, including e-mails. Second, any organization that collects PII and medical information is subject to HIPAA. There may be other data privacy laws and regulations in the US. So regardless of anything else, providing business e-mails to a third party in any way might be legally sticky.

Yes, they offered to buy the emails, not the addresses, the content. They said it was to train some AI programme and that these e-mails had to be in English (at least C1 level) and have at least one reply.

Which country (and state, if applicable) are you in, and which countries/states are the people who sent you those e-mails in?