Well the promoters and owners of safelists will tell you they are.
Our experience with safelists has been:
Pre 9/11 they were a good and cheap way for me to sell my ebooks and affiliate programs. The most successful types of safelists were the opt in list based ones. That is you downloaded a list of email addresses and used your own mailing program to send them out. These types of lists were responsive because with a good quality emailing program I was able to target my advertising to specific groups. For example if I was selling a product or service that was for the Australian market only I was able to extract the email addresses that had dot com dot au. Using this technique I was not sending lots of emails to members of the safelist that could not use what I was promoting. I was able to send those others an offer that was relevant to them.
Unfortunately these types of lists are rare as hen’s teeth these days, mainly due to the owners having to waste a lot of time policing the spammers. With the web based safelists (safelists that send the email on your behalf) this type of targeting is not possible.
Anyway sales fell dramatically after 9/11 not just with safelists, but safelists for me have never recovered in sales volume. I began to use the safelists in another way. I used them to build my database by offering a two part marketing approach. This approach initially was successful in getting new prospects and eventually some making purchases.
Then along came autosubmitters. They send your emails by doing your submitting to all your safelists. You no longer had to log onto every safelist and submit your message for sending, the autosubmitter did it all for you.
Since the widespread use of these autosubmitters results from safelists even requests for more information has dried up. Safelists for me anyway, these days produce very little return in fact its almost useless.
Consider this scenario, you sign up for a safe list, you send out your message, then in return you get thousands of emails back. You do not have the time to read them so you DELETE them. But guess what, the person(s) who received your email message are doing the exact same thing!!
Even though you sent your email to legitimate email addresses, what is the point of it if no one reads them and acts on them.
Some safelists want you to supply two email addresses, one to receive emails from others and another for admin message from the safelist owner. Why? Cause the safelist owner wants you to read your emails from them, and they know if its in the same email account as the safelist messages you will probably delete them without reading them.
Then you also have the paid safelists, where it is claimed you will get better results. I have signed up on a few and the results were no different.
Others offer you free membership, but you can only send every seven days or variations on that. If you are on any free with a number of days for each mailing (that is you can not mail daily) get off them, the safelist owner is using you to promote his large list to others trying to get them and you to sign up as paying members.
My own research into safelists and in talking with people who have used them plus reading posts in newsgroups and discussion boards suggests that most people achieve very little success using safelists.
Perhaps they do work for some people, perhaps you need a certain type of product or service (to date I don’t know of one) to be successful in safelists.
However I still subscribe to a small number of them. The main reason is for research and to see what is happening in the market place.