Many companies have been looking for ways to combat spammers, with some of them coming up with a smart solution: setting up a spam trap, a special email address for identifying spammy emails.
Read on to learn about spam traps and ways to avoid them.
What Are Spam Traps?
It’s only natural for a company to protect itself against low-quality emails, including spammy emails. In this never-ending fight, companies create spam traps – special email addresses that do not belong to real users (although they look humanlike) and are used to spot and chase spam emails.
Spam trap email addresses are valid and deliverable, which makes them difficult to distinguish and quite effective to safeguard against dubious correspondence. Internet service providers and blacklist services consequently block spammers using spam traps.
An important thing to mention is that spam traps receive and block only unsolicited emails to keep those out of your inbox. Before we discuss the ways to avoid spam traps, let’s go through different types of them.
3 Types Of Spam Traps
Source: Zerobounce
Pristine Spam Traps
Pristine spam traps are email addresses that have never been used before, which makes them extremely challenging to detect. More often than not, these email addresses are deliberately left open to the public, waiting for their prey. When spammers search for new email contacts, they have every chance to unknowingly add these addresses to their email list and then get their due punishment.
What happens next? The admin monitors which addresses start emailing the spam trap email. Those senders get identified, blocked, and added to the spammers database.
Many companies use a shortcut when generating leads: they buy a readymade email list of contacts, hoping to engage and convert a fair share of these contacts. Unfortunately, many email lists are sold by web scrapers, including spam trap emails, decreasing the deliverability or even ruining the company’s sender reputation altogether.
Here are the three best ways to maintain your email sender reputation.
Recycled Spam Traps
Remember your first email address with a comic name or the name of the video game character? What about the one that you used while studying at university? These emails have long been abandoned, but they might still be deliverable, potential spam traps.
ISPs and antispam organizations use expired domain names and people’s old abandoned emails to set them as recycled spam traps.
Hitting a recycled spam trap can mean two things:
- You have not reviewed and updated your email list for a while and are now sending newsletters to invalid addresses
- You have purchased an email list to build your marketing campaign on
Getting into recycled spam traps is less critical since they are more complicated to set and control. For instance, you may accidentally email a coworker who no longer works for the company. Does it mean you are a spammer? Obviously not. Likewise, you may make a typo when sending an email and get into a spam trap.
Typo Spam Traps
At least once in your life, you have probably misspelled “gmail.com” and sent an email to “gmal.com” instead. Were you surprised when it didn’t bounce? You might have hit a typo spam trap.
An email address is likely a typo spam trap if it includes misspelled names of popular domains like Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, or Hotmail. This type of trap is the least dangerous, as hitting it is usually unintentional and thus tolerated by ISPs.
There aren’t any consequences after sending something to a typo spam trap email. However, it is better to double-check the recipient’s email address before hitting the send button.
What Happens When You Send an Email To A Spam Trap
Being caught in a spam trap can have various consequences, depending on the type of trap you’ve got into. Sometimes, an email can bounce, telling you that you have hit a spam trap. In this ideal situation, you have a chance to remove invalid email contacts from your list.
If you send an email to a pristine spam trap, your IP address or domain may get blocked by your ISP. It will ruin your sender’s reputation and negatively affect your deliverability. Next, you will have to go the extra mile to recover your reputation and prove that you are not a spammer.
How To Avoid Spam Traps
The first and simplest rule is not to send emails to spam traps if you care about your marketing campaign. Avoiding spam traps is not that complicated. Care about your email hygiene and follow these basic practices:
- Don’t buy an email list or import contacts unsolicitedly.
- Improve the security of your subscription forms by adding ReCaptcha. This will prevent bots from getting into your list.
- Send a confirmation email after the subscription to make sure people are giving their consent when signing up.
- Cleanse your list of email addresses regularly to remove invalid, non-deliverable, and inactive contacts.
- Investigate cases when your emails bounce to detect spam traps and get rid of them.
- Investigate any unusual surge of new contacts and check their validity.
Furthermore, there are different email validation services you can use to optimize your contact list and detect spam traps.
What If You Already Hit A Spam Trap?
If you find out that you have run into a spam trap, do not shut down your entire email campaign. Wait a bit for an email to bounce, and if it doesn’t, try to detect a spam trap and remove it from your mailing list. Next, try to improve your overall email hygiene.
Additionally, analyze your engagement rate. If it gets lower for no reason, you have probably got blacklisted. If it remains the same or goes up, you have successfully tackled the problem.
But then again, it is better to take preventive steps and avoid any spam trap emails in the first place. Once damaged, the senders’s reputation (read: company’s reputation) might be quite challenging to recover.
Email Marketing Extravaganza at MailCon Show in New York
MailCon is back with a one-day email performance and deliverability conference on July 28th in New York City.
Every attendee will get:
- Productive email marketing sessions reinforced with panels and workshops addressing the most pressing topics for mailers
- Speaking and exhibition opportunities
- Connecting with renowned email marketing professionals and experts
And here’s why MailCon is the coolest email marketing event you can attend:
Here are some of the topics you’ll get covered on July 28th:
- Brand Safety & Better Subscriptions: What You Need to Know, by Ebenezer Anjorin, Lead Product Manager at Google Workspace
- Email Deliverability Starts Where Best Practices Fall Short, by Adrian W. from Email Angels
- The Importance of Securing Your Email Infrastructure and How to Do It, by Kevin A. McGrail, CEO of Peregrine Computer Consultants Corporation, and LB Blair, Head of Deliverability at Email Industries.
- Future-Proof Your Brand Like Beyoncé: Integrating Email & Social Media for Iconic Digital Presence, by Carlos Gil from GetResponse
- Insights from the expertise of renowned email deliverability consultants like Trey Bennett, Keith Kouzmanoff, Jakub Olexa, and more
- Expert panel on navigating the complexities of consumer privacy and compliance regulations, by Eric J. Troutman, Puja J. Amin, and Brittany Andres
- Marketing Crossfire session hosted by Channel Automation™ and featuring industry thought leaders
And so much more!
Get your tickets now before they sell out!
For those new, here’s everything you need to know about MailCon in just 90 seconds:
