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How to Locate Spam Trap Email Addresses on Your Mailing List?

How to Locate Spam Trap Email Addresses on Your Mailing List?

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use a set of techniques to identify and penalize spammers. One of such techniques is spam trap email addresses. Often legitimate email marketers get caught by ISPs and suffer from being unable to deliver their email newsletters because some time they hit a spam trap mailbox. In this article we'll tell about what a spam trap is, how spam traps can get into your list and what to do to avoid sending emails to spam trap addresses.

What is a Spam Trap?

A spam trap is a valid email address which does not act upon the email in no way and is used to "trap" unsolicited email. Spam traps are hold by an ISP or third party to determine if you are emailing to recipients who have subscribed to your newsletters and if you are clearing your email list from bad/unsubscribe emails in a timely manner.

There are 2 types of spam trap email addresses:

  • Old email addresses which have been abandoned by the users. Here is a scenario with Hotmail. The user subscribed for your newsletters a year ago. Some time later he decides not to use his Hotmail account anymore and does not check it. After a few months, his account is deactivated but still able to receive emails. After a few more months of user inactivity Hotmail closes the user's account and he will no longer be able to re-activate the account. All emails sent to this address will bounce. At this point good email marketers should remove the user's email from their list. A few months later, Hotmail reactivates the user's email address and uses it as a spam trap. Now this email address will receive all emails without a bounce notification. Nobody will open or click emails. Hotmail will use this address for the only purpose to determine if you are emailing to active and engaged subscribers or not.
  • Honey pot addresses, which are email addresses created specifically to trap spammers. Honey pot email addresses do not belong to real users. They are spread by some anti-spam organizations across websites, blogs, forums etc. with the aim to attract spammers to harvest emails and send spam. Once you are known to email to these spam trap addresses, your IP address is added to the Spamhaus blacklist database. Large ISPs such as Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL use the Spamhaus database when filtering incoming emails, and then may block your messages until your IP is removed from the blacklist. Obviously, this hurts your deliverability and sender reputation.

How You Can Get Spam Trap Addresses on Your List

Common ways of how spam traps can leak into your list are:

  • they can be a part of a purchased list;
  • they can be harvested on the Internet without the users' knowledge;
  • some inactive emails on your opt-in list can be turned into spam traps if you do not supress bounce addresses from your list [after about 12 to 18 months inactive email addresses become spam traps];
  • someone either unintentionally or maliciously subscribed to your emails;
  • the subscriber made a typo in the email address while registering on your website. This misspelled email could be a spam trap.
  • the subscriber deliberately typed a fake email address on your website just to get to the next step of your marketing campaign. This fake address could be a spam trap as well.

How to Protect Yourself from Sending to Spam Traps

Whatever way a spam trap address came to your list, hitting it can lead to your IP being blacklisted by the trap's creator. Bad news is that spam traps are kept in secret and identifying them in a list of thousands or millions emails is nearly impossible.

What's more important is that you take proactive measures to ensure spam traps don't get on your lists in the first place:

  • Never buy or harvest emails on the Internet.
  • Never send emails to people who did not subscribe to your list.
  • Strengthen your sign up process by using the double opt-in method.
  • Always include a working unsubscribe link and put it in the place where it can be easily found by the user.
  • Provide the subscriber a way to update their profile with you.
  • Exclude the emails of unsubscribed recipients from your list after each email campaign. Our email processor and parser software will handle unsubscribe emails for you in a fast and effective manner.
  • Remove bounce emails from your list before sending the newsletter. Using our email verification software will not only verify your list and determine bad email addresses, it will also quickly process bounce emails after your email is sent.
  • Do not send to email addresses beginning with sales@ or info@ as they represent aliases usually for departmental functions and not individuals. Do not email to postmaster@ or abuse@ addresses either as they are usually compliant handling aliases at ISPs, which never subscribe to email newsletters.
  • Do not send your newsletters to recipients who did not open your email for the last 6-12 months [you can send a re-engagement email to them first].
  • Keep opt-in records with the date to have the proof that the recipient explicitly signed up to receive your emails.

Having spam trap addresses on your list can head your email marketing campaigns to failure. As identifying and removing spam traps is almost impossible, prevention is the key. Using the double opt-in signup process and caring about the list hygiene are two major steps to preventing delivery issues with ISPs. However, if blacklisting took place, contact the blacklist database owner and go through the removal process as soon as possible.

Additional resource: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamtrap

G-Lock Software - EasyMail, Email Verifier, Fast Blog Finder, Directory Submitter, SpamCombat, Email Processor


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