IS THIS ILLEGAL?300000 SCHOOL EMAIL LIST

Eh, I think you just shot yourself in the foot here.

Imagine if you do decide to do the spamming later on and say if the matter blows up big and someone happens to bump into this thread... the authorities or your uni can use it as evidence against you that you already had the intention of spamming. By then, your excuses of "my email was hacked" or "it was a mistake" would be disregarded. Your ISP will easily cooperate with the authorities to reveal your IP addresses and the data being transmitted out (to post this). You would be facing charges of "computer misuse act" and so on.

All I have to say is, Facebook did it when they were founded. They took all the contact info of harvard students and used them.

That being said, its deff illegal for the simple fact is that these people did not opt in. Not that the billion companies gave two craps about it tho since they survived long enough to have f u money .