Hi Nick,
First of all, I have not used the ripe database contact info to send marketing, advertising or anything to promote a service or product.
I apologize to anyone that was disturbed by my e-mail. I have tried not to send any duplicates and limited as much as possible any discomfort. I'm not doing this on a regular basis and probably you've never got an e-mail from me before.
There are 43 million IP addresses which are allocated in RIPE region and are not announced in the global BGP table. Of course there are some which are not announced on purpose and to those I apologize again. But there are many IP addresses which are not in use and the only way to get in touch with the users is by contacting them using obviously publicly available contact information.
I have e-mailed contacts for specific subnets that were checked to be not advertised. How else should we get the IPs to the market ? There's no tool provided by RIPE or any other solution to push this huge amount to the market. Maybe some are concerned that bringing up the unused space will lower the prices. Well, I am not supporting those who sit on huge amount of IPs and seek prices in the 10+ EUR range. I really hope IPv6 will move quicker and in a couple of years no IPv4 will have value so while there is still some demand, we're doing our best to find the supply, to dig it up to the surface.
So, once again at this moment there are over 43 million IPs in the RIPE region only that are not advertised in the BGP table. The total amount of IPs transferred over the past 4 years in the RIPE region is ~27 million.
I apologize if my method was too extreme and have upset some people but I promise not to bother you again. Most likely there are people who just sit on the resources and don't care about other's needs. We can't seem to be able to lift their butts off them.
Have a nice week,
Ciprian