Email - Spam Traps

Overview

Spam traps are email addresses used by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and blocklist operators to identify senders who do not follow email best practices. These email addresses may have been valid in the past, but are now inactive or invalid. For example, if one of your contacts changes jobs, their old work email address would no longer be valid. Contacts who have not interacted with your emails by opening or clicking them within a reasonable amount of time (no longer than a year) could have been made into spam traps and should be removed from your contact lists.

Spam Trap vs Spam Filter

There is a difference between a spam filter and a spam trap. Spam filters (like Proofpoint) are created to automatically detect and prevent unwanted emails, whether at a corporate or user level, by analyzing the content and senders of incoming messages. Additionally, spam filters provide protection against email viruses and malware by scanning attachments and links. Spam traps are email addresses specifically meant to catch spammers and identify poor email practices and are used by email providers and anti-spam organizations to monitor and track spam sources.

Spam trap categories

Pristine spam traps are the most dangerous and created solely to be used as traps and were never meant to be on a sender’s list. They are generally obtained by scraping websites and buying lists and are therefore the most damaging to sending reputation. If you've emailed a pristine spam trap, your domain or sending IP address could be immediately blocklisted.

Recycled spam traps are invalid email addresses that were at one time live addresses. If you send email to recycled spam traps regularly, you could start to see your emails being routed to the junk/spam folder by ISP’s.

Typo includes addresses that have been incorrectly entered upon sign-up. For example, @gail.com.

Why is avoiding spam traps important?

Ramifications for hitting spam traps can range in severity, depending on what type you hit, the organization running the trap, and how often you hit it. Inbox providers often maintain their own proprietary blocklists, using them in combination with independent, third-party blocklists like Spamhaus. Elevated spam trap rates are indicative of employing improper methods to gather email addresses and/or neglecting good list hygiene practices. This situation could lead to your IP address or domain being blocklisted as spam, damaging your sender reputation and deliverability.

Here are a few potential consequences that may arise from sending emails to any type of spam trap address:

Lower Deliverability: Sending emails to spam traps can result in a decrease in overall email deliverability. Email providers utilize advanced algorithms to assess whether an email is legitimate or spam. If you, as a sender, consistently trigger spam traps, your overall sender reputation may be adversely impacted, leading to lower deliverability rates.

Reputation Damage: Falling into spam traps strongly indicates poor email hygiene and possibly unethical email practices. This can harm your sender reputation in the eyes of email service providers and anti-spam organizations. A dinged sender reputation is challenging to restore. Once labeled as a spammer, ISPs are reluctant to trust your emails, affecting future campaigns.

Blocklisting: Persistently hitting spam traps could result in a sender's IP address or domain being blocklisted. Being blocklisted means that major email providers may refuse or filter out emails from that sender, hindering legitimate messages from reaching recipients.

How to Avoid Spam Traps

• Avoiding the purchase of mailing lists is crucial. Acquiring such lists significantly increases the risk of hitting spam traps since it is highly probable that these lists contain spam addresses.

• Make sure you are using engagement data in your lists/queries. Spam traps will not and cannot ever interact with your emails. Omeda’s Audience Builder has several ways to easily manage that.

• Ensure email addresses are valid. You can run your list through a list hygiene service, which uses their proprietary algorithms and knowledgebase to validate email addresses. While list hygiene services can help remove bad email addresses and spam traps, note they have no insight into spam traps maintained by blocklist operators such as Spamhaus.

• If possible, avoid using role/group addresses as these are widely used as spam traps to catch marketers with poor list collection techniques.

• If you are encountering persistent issues even after thoroughly cleaning your email list, consider eliminating spam traps by implementing list segmentation. By isolating clean list segments devoid of any potential spam traps and segregating them from the rest of your list, you can gradually refine the segments until you successfully pinpoint the spam trap.

• You can send reengagement campaigns to subscribers who have not engaged with your content in the past few months--a year at the most. Start in small groups and monitor the deployments very carefully. Eliminate subscribers who do not respond to the reengagement campaigns to filter out any contacts that may be considered spam traps.

How Omeda helps

Omeda will assist if you get blocked due to hitting pristine spam traps. You will get alerted by the Email Deliverability team and your Client Success Manager, who will work with you and the spam trap operator to resolve the situation. A delisting can be requested by utilizing a form provided by the service that has blocklisted you. It may be necessary to furnish details regarding the steps taken to resolve the issue. Omeda will handle this for you whenever possible. When the block is removed, we’ll help you build queries for your deployments that include only your most engaged subscribers to start with. Omeda will continue to monitor deployments to ensure there are no additional issues.

The time its takes to rebuild reputation usually takes into account the total, type and frequency of spam trap hits, your email contact list size, email frequency, and overall email contact engagement. The quality of your collected email addresses is the greatest influence, so if suspect data is easily identified and removed, your sender reputation can recover that much faster.