Spam Traps 101: from Nightmare to Opportunity

Email getting into a spam trap is a nightmare for any email marketer. Unfortunately, it can happen even with the best of us. Afterward, we keep wondering how a spam trap could get on our mailing list. Let’s solve this jigsaw puzzle step by step and by the end of this article, everything will fall into place.

What is a Spam Trap?

A spam trap is an email address with certain characteristics, created with the sole purpose of catching spam emails.

Spam trap characteristics are:

• It is deliverable. Spam trap receives emails just like any other email address and it doesn’t bounce.
• It is not associated with an individual. The spam trap doesn’t belong to any particular human (as a personal email address).
• It cannot sign up for your email list. Since it is not owned by a person, there is no way for it to sign up for any email newsletters whatsoever.
• It is monitored by human or automated processes. Depending on an organization, there could be either a human or an automated program that sorts through the spam emails.

When an email is sent to a spam trap, the content of that email will be considered spam and the sender will be considered a spammer.

Why Should You Care about Spam Traps?

For two reasons: firstly, even if your email behavior is well intended, it does not mean you are immune to ending up with a spam trap on your list. Secondly, you already might be sending emails to spam traps without even knowing it, and that way posing risk to your email deliverability. In both cases, you can’t protect yourself from what you don’t know about.

Who Creates Spam Traps?

There are different organizations that can create spam traps:

• ISPs — they create spam traps for user protection against malicious content;
• For-profit companies that sell spam filtering services. They use spam traps to identify the incoming spam so they could help their clients filter it out;
• Non-profit organizations, like Spamhaus or SpamCop, that track spam and similar cyber-threats;
• Individual anti-spam vigilantes — particular people who fight against spammers.

People mistakenly believe some misconceptions about spam traps to be true:

1. You can handpick spam traps from the email list.

False. Oftentimes it is just impossible to visually detect a spam trap because it looks like a regular email address.

2. You can obtain the list of spam traps.

When you hear that someone has obtained a crisp spam trap list — do not believe that. Spam traps change all the time, new ones appear, and there are millions of them.

Types of Spam Traps

Spam traps can have different forms. There are three commonly known types of spam traps: pristine, recycled, and email address with typos.

Pristine

Pristine is the worst type of trap. It has never been somebody’s personal email address and was created solely for catching spam emails. There is no way of justifying why this email address ended up on your mailing list. In most cases, pristine spam traps can be obtained as a result of scraping or purchasing email lists. Hitting a pristine spam trap has the worst consequences for your email deliverability.

Recycled

Not as bad as pristine, but still highlights some of marketer’s bad email list management habits. Recycled spam traps used to be owned by persons. As it often happens, people change their email addresses and abandon previous ones. After some time of inactivity, usually 12 months, providers can revive abandoned email addresses and turn them into a spam trap.

Typos

Email addresses with typos are also a popular way of catching spam messages. Most commonly, they have misspelled domain part of the address, for example, @hotail instead of @hotmail, @gmal instead of @gmail, etc.

By now you can see that most spam trap hits happen due to poor list management. Let’s figure out how exactly did a spam trap get on your list.

How Did a Spam Trap Get on Your List?

Read our full article here: https://glockapps.com/blog/spam-traps-from-nightmare-to-opportunity/