Overview
This article gives you an overview of what spam traps are, the different types of spam traps, how to identify one, and their impact.
Contents
What is a spam trap?
Spam traps are a type of fraud management tool, used by major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as Microsoft and Google and blocklist providers. These organisations use spam traps to help them identify suspicious senders, spammers and phishers so they can block emails from them.
Spam traps look like real email addresses, but they are not used by a real person and cannot be used for any kind of communication. Spam trap addresses will never engage with an email, meaning they cannot open or click on any links. Most importantly, since spam trap addresses can't opt-in to receive email, the only way they could end up on your list is if you're not implementing a data hygiene strategy, or you're not abiding by the rules of permission-based email marketing (i.e. purchasing lists which can violate 2003’s CAN-SPAM act).
If a spam trap address ends up on one of your mailing lists, and you send to that email address, its called "hitting a spam trap".
Types of spam traps
There are two types of traps:
Pristine traps - also known as honey pots or pure spam traps
These are email addresses created solely for the purpose of being traps. They have never been used by anyone: never opted into a mailing list, used to sign up for an account, or handed out on a business card. They could be any email address from any ISP or business domain. Sometimes they are email addresses that have typos in them.
Since they are placed around the web by the blocklist providers to trap people into scraping the email addresses, the only way this kind of spam trap could end up on your mailing list is if they were obtained without permission. There is no way that these traps have ever opted-in or consented to receive emails.
When email addresses are collected this way, they're often shared with other spammers or added to bulk mailing lists that get sold to people who may not understand the consequences of emailing people without permission.
Therefore if someone sends to a pristine trap they have illegally scraped that email from the web or purchased a list.
Recycled traps
This is the kind of trap you could hit even if every email address on the list was obtained with permission. But they're still bad news because sending to these addresses can make you look like a spammer.
These traps used to be legitimate email addresses but are no longer in use by the original owner. These email addresses are re-purposed by ISPs to catch spammers and organisations who have poor data hygiene practices.
It is possible that any old email address could be turned into a recycled trap. If you do not regularly undergo data hygiene practices to remove these older email addresses, you could be at risk of sending to recycled traps.
It is also important to note, that because these recycled spam traps are real email addresses, any emails that are sent to them are accepted by the server (i.e. not rejected like a bounce), there will just be no opens or clicks recorded for this email address (i.e. an unengaged contact).
The list below gives you an idea of how long it takes certain Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to deactivate an inactive account.
Outlook: 270 days
GMail: 270 days
Yahoo!: 180 days
AOL: 90 days
How do you identify a trap?
You won't necessarily know you have a spam trap in your list. They look just like normal email addresses. They aren't publicized and so it's a lot of guesswork. However, there are a few things you could do to minimize the likelihood of having a spam trap in your list.
- Don’t ever purchase an email list.
- Use double-opt in or confirmed opt-in during your sign up process.
- By using double-opt in you can make sure that an email address belongs to a real person. This is a powerful way to catch typos and fake email addresses that could be spam traps.
- Remove any email addresses that have typos, particularly in the domain (e.g. the @gmail.com part).
- Suppress bounced email addresses before they turn into traps.
- If an email address contains a typo, you run the risk of it being a spam trap email address, just out of pure coincidence.
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Please note, Vuture will automatically suppress contacts who bounce consistently. However, these contacts information should be reviewed. Any contact whose email address is no longer valid, should be removed from the bounce suppression folder and archived so that they do not get added to any future lists. For more information on this, please review this article on bounces.
- Manage your inactive subscribers and introduce a sunsetting strategy.
- Contacts who don't engage with you over a long period of time are at risk of being turned into traps. It would be a good idea to introduce a reengagement program for inactive contacts and, for any that don't engage, to sunset them and suppress them from your list.
- See more information on list hygiene and other best practice you can use in a data hygiene strategy.
Their impact
The impact of hitting a spam trap varies and depends on variables like: the type of trap you hit, how many times you hit it, and how the spam trap operator handles things at their end.
In order of bad to really bad, here's what can happen if you send email to a spam trap:
- Your sender reputation will be damaged, causing bounce rates to increase and your deliverability (the percentage of emails that make it to the inbox) to decrease.
- Our IP addresses may be added to a blocklist database, which means deliverability for you as well as other customers will be affected.
- If you hit a spam trap operated by one of the major ISPs, such as Yahoo or AOL, they could permanently blocklist your sending domain.
- If you hit a trap operated by an anti-spam organization, for example, Spamhaus or SpamCop, delivery of your emails to all ISPs - as well as companies who consult their databases - will be affected because they use that information to filter incoming emails.
- Read more on Blocklists here.
Further links
