SPAM TRAPS, WHAT ARE THEY?

TL;DR:

Spam traps are tools used by ISPs and blacklist providers to combat spam. They appear as legitimate email addresses but are designed to catch spam senders. Recognizing and avoiding spam traps is crucial for email marketers to maintain their sender reputation. There are different types of spam traps, such as typographical traps that capitalize on common spelling errors, gray or recycled traps that use abandoned email addresses, clean traps found on web scrapers, and domain traps that turn all addresses associated with a domain into traps. To avoid these traps, email marketing professionals must follow best practices, keep their email lists clean, and prioritize ethical email marketing principles.

How Do Spam Traps Work?

Spam traps are a technique to prevent spam. Spam traps are built by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and blacklist providers to lure in spam senders and stop them.

Spam traps are a crucial tool in the fight against fraud, as spam makes up more than half of all email traffic worldwide.

Recognizing Spam Traps

A spam trap, also known as a honeypot, simulates being a real email address but is actually fake.

Spam traps don't belong to anyone and are not used for outgoing correspondence. Since spam trap addresses never opt in to receive emails, any incoming message would be marked as spam due to the sender.

The only way spam traps end up on your email lists is if you don't practice proper email hygiene and don't follow permission-based email marketing guidelines.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and blacklist providers (like Composite Blocking, SpamCop) frequently use spam traps to catch malicious senders. Legitimate senders who don't keep their email hygiene up to date or employ poor list-building techniques can also raise a red flag.

Types of Spam Traps

Typographical Spam Traps

Have you ever typed "Google" incorrectly in your browser's address bar and still ended up on Google.com? Do you recall the last time you sent an email to "Gmial" or "yaho," and it didn't bounce back?

This is how typographical spam traps work. Despite the domain's typography, these are real email addresses that don't bounce. ISPs set them up to learn about marketing best practices.

They generate addresses with deliberate errors, typically errors people commonly make when entering their address into a form. They then inspect emails sent to these addresses for phishing and other harmful activities.

Gray or Recycled Spam Traps

Are you still using the email address you had in school? It might be a spam trap. ISPs and blacklist creators frequently use abandoned email addresses to identify spammers. These are known as gray or recycled spam traps.

If you follow best email marketing practices, there are few ways to end up with a gray spam trap on your list. However, here are two examples:

Your email list was obtained from a third party, and you didn't use an email list cleaning service to vet it. Don't forget to do that; a free email verification can be helpful.
That email address may have been added to your list previously. Meanwhile, an ISP or blacklist provider has turned it into a spam trap.

In the latter scenario, one or more of the emails you sent to that specific address must have bounced. You have a gray spam trap because you haven't removed the bounce, and it could be affecting your sender reputation right now.

Monitoring your lists is crucial, from opt-ins to hard bounces and opt-outs. The first step you can take to avoid spam traps is paying close attention to your engagement rates, especially bounce and open rates.

Additionally, to avoid recycled spam traps:

Use an email list cleaning system to permanently suppress bounces and prevent them in the first place.
Non-responsive users should be removed from your emails.
If you're not confident that an email list is performing well, don't use it.

Clean Spam Traps

Sending emails to users who don't expect to hear from you is considered abusive by ISPs and blacklist providers.

Clean spam traps can assist in this situation.

In order for web scrapers to identify and collect email addresses, ISPs or blacklist providers make them publicly available on forums or blogs.

Unfortunately, many email lists available for purchase come from web scrapers. ISPs will monitor and possibly ban senders who send clean spam traps to protect their consumers and stop potential spammers.

Perfect spam traps are incredibly damaging to your sender reputation due to their nature. The why is easy to understand: the only way a marketer would include them in an email list is if they disregard ethical email marketing principles.

Domain Spam Traps

Despite being equally dangerous, email marketing professionals rarely mention domain spam traps.

In this case, every email address associated with a specific domain functions as a spam trap. Blacklist providers shamelessly asked domain owners to point their MX records to them when their domains were inactive. From then on, all email addresses for that domain become spam traps.

How to Avoid Spam Traps

In our latest blog, we unravel the mystery behind why so many emails end up in the dreaded spam folder. If you're a sender, whether new or experienced, looking to ensure your messages reach your recipients' inboxes, this article is a must-read. You'll discover key strategies, like email authentication, list management, creating engaging content, and more, to ensure your legitimate emails don't get lost in the spam abyss. Don't miss these essential tips! Read more here to learn how to avoid your emails ending up in the spam folder and maximize the power of email.