Explaining Spam Traps
This article was submitted to me, and the author allowed me to post it. The author would like to remain anonymous.
Issue: A. Company has hit two spam traps in the first 1,300 transactional emails it has sent. Spam traps indicate that an emailer is likely sending out unwanted email. Spam traps are a way of catching these spammers.
What is a spam trap?
A spam trap is a dormant email address. Spam traps begin as regular email addresses, then are closed down for whatever reason – a person stops using it and gives it back to the owner of the domain (i.e. Hotmail.com) or Hotmail creates a bunch of fake email addresses that it then shuts down for a year, etc. After that year of inactivity (no opens, no responses, etc.), the owner of that email address starts looking at the email it gets and labels that email as spam. They never respond to the emailer telling them they are getting spammed: if they did then it would be easy for spammers to avoid their spam traps.
Why is A. Company hitting spam traps if the email addresses it is getting are from its customers?
There are two main ways this happens:
1. The email address was given to A. Company a long time ago, it was closed at some point, and then the new owner turned it into a spam trap
2. A customer may have spelled their email address wrong. This happens much more often than you would think.
What should we do about it:
Short-term:
1. Use a solution like Experian Email Insights to scrub the customer database of email address. This solution has access to roughly 250,000,000,000 emails that have been sent over the last 12 months by the 200 largest emails senders. This establishes a strong record of which email addresses have been opening emails and which haven’t.
2. Initially only send to email addresses that have recently opened an email sent from A. Company. This will build up a good reputation with the ISPs and allow us to start sending emails out to new customers soon.
Long-term:
1. In addition to the scrubbing above, A. Company should implement a double-entry method when acquiring new customers. By forcing a person to enter their email address twice, and making sure it matches, the likelihood of a mistake Is much less.
2. There are some solutions available that will check in real-time if an address entered a website is correct.
3. A best practice is to also stop sending email to anyone who hasn’t opened an A. Company in the last 12 months, although this can be circumnavigated by good scrubbing.
What happens if we don’t do anything?
A. Company is already blocked by Hotmail. If we hit spam traps are other domains, they will likely shut us down as well. In addition, there is a global spam trap organization called Spamhaus. If a Spamhaus spam trap is hit or if enough ISPs block us, then Spamhaus will place A. Company on its Block List which all ISPs follow to identify spammers and A. Company will not be able to send any emails.
So, what should we do?
Since A. Company has already hit two spam traps with Hotmail, Hotmail may require A. Company to write up a plan indicating how it will do a better job ensuring the email addresses we send to are valid. Otherwise they may not unblock us at all. We can create a plan based upon the best practices described above, add some additional best practices in that the send ESP has suggested, submit that plan to Hotmail for approval, and make sure we follow it to get us back into good graces with Hotmail and to ensure that we won’t hit anymore spam traps.
