Best Practice Tip: What is a Spam Trap and How Can You Avoid One?
Spam. No one likes it. It’s unsolicited, unwanted, and sent out indiscriminately. On the other hand, it’s inexpensive, stored in a can, and probably lasts forever. A lot of people like it fried too. Wait. That’s SPAM. An easy mistake to make. Using the term “spam” for unwanted email was derived from the British comedy troupe, Monty Python, and their famous spam song.
“The CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t apply just to bulk email. It covers all commercial messages, including email that promotes content on commercial websites. That means all email – for example, a message to former customers announcing a new product line – must comply with the law.” FTC Business Guidelines
Everyone gets spam emails. You don’t even need to have signed up for anything to receive spam. Spam can be sent by people, but more often, it’s sent by a spam bot. Bots send emails to random email addresses, as well as those addresses that are known. Spam can also be distributed via text messages, social media, and even fax machines.
“People love getting mail, just not junk mail. Email marketing is one of the most popular communication channels. It is also one of the most important and effective tools in online marketing. With the help of email marketing, you can advertise products and services and create strong customer loyalty.” Andrews Wharton
How Effective is Spam Mail?
About 45% -- let’s call it half -- of all email is spam (Statista) That may sound like a lot, but in 2014 it was about 65%. While spam is mostly benign, phishing emails are not. When in doubt about the authenticity of an email, throw it out.
Spam is surprisingly profitable, and most of it isn’t fraudulent. According to a UCB and UCSD study in 2008, spam emails have a response rate of 0.000008%. Despite that, spammers are still, obviously, able to turn a profit -- as much as 300 million dollars a month. (PCMag)
Let’s say “SpamRUs" sends out an email with an advertisement for its product at a price of 100 dollars. The email is sent automatically to 10 million email addresses. These email addresses were found on public websites. 0.000008% of the users (80 people) react to this email and order the product.
10 million * 0.000008% * 100 dollars = 8,000 dollars
“In 2021, there were an estimated 319.6 billion e-mails sent and received daily around the world. This figure is projected to increase to 376.4 billion daily e-mails by 2025.” Statista
What are Spam Traps?
A spam trap is an email address maintained by an internet service provider, or spam monitoring service. The email address is never clicked or opened, which means that it doesn’t actively engage with any emails it receives.
Common Types of Spam Traps
The Pristine Spam Trap
The classic spam trap consists of email addresses that were never valid and cannot receive email. The email addresses are available on public websites but are hidden in the HTML code.
The purpose of the classic spam trap is to identify those email marketers who build email lists either by culling websites or buying email contact lists.
The Recycled Spam Trap
This spam trap contains email addresses that were once valid, but are now used elsewhere. A person may have signed up with this email address, but it is no longer being used.
The recycled spam traps may be on your mailing list if you have not obtained permission for every email address on your list, or when your mailing list is older.
The Typo Spam Trap
The typo spam trap is similar to the recycled trap. It aims to look legitimate to catch spammers. Instead of recycling legitimate email addresses, typo traps contain subtle typos, even though they are different addresses.
Examples include the following:
@outlok instead of @outlook
@a0l instead of @aol
@protton instead of @proton
How Do Spam Traps Work?
The purpose of any spam trap is to manage fraud. Blacklist providers use spam traps to identify spammers so they can be blocked. A spam trap appears to be a normal email address, however, it isn't a real account and can't be used.
For example, if one of your contacts has moved to a new company, their old email address will no longer be invalid. Any email address that hasn’t opened email from you in more than a year could now be a spam trap. Your email contact lists should be less than one year old, and should contain only a qualified list of contacts.
Email providers want to ensure their users are only getting the emails they really want -- and they use spam traps to ensure that. In addition to email providers, there are anti-spam organizations like Spam Haus, Project Honey Pot, or Spam Cop actively fighting spam.
There are currently 500 million spam trap email addresses currently active on Project Honey Pot.
What Happens if I Hit a Spam Trap?
The impact of spam traps depends on the type of trap. A classic spam trap usually has more severe effects than a recycled spam trap.
If you send an email to a classic spam trap, your domain or IP address for sending an email may be immediately placed on an exclusion list. If you regularly send emails to recycled spam traps, your emails are likely to be forwarded to the spam folder with increasing frequency.
Addresses are intentionally created to become a trap for spammers. The address itself is kept secret. If an email then arrives in this mailbox, it is clear that the spammer is simply trying out all possible names or combinations of letters as the e-mail address. Without a double opt-in, of course.
“Ramifications for hitting spam traps can range in severity, depending on what kind you hit, the organization running the trap, and how often you hit it. On the extreme side, an ISP or security organization can block the IP address (or entire range of IP addresses) from which the emails are coming.” Mailchimp
What are the Consequences for Your Email Marketing if Spam Traps Exist in Your Mailing Lists?
The way hits are handled varies. Some providers classify the sender as a spammer with just one hit and blacklist them. With others, the reaction follows only after a certain frequency of advertising mails.
It’s not only your reputation that is at stake. If your business relies on email marketing for sales and growth, being unable to email freely can severely damage your business.
What to Do if Your IP or Domain Name is on an Email Blacklist
If you find your IP address or domain name is on an email blacklist, you should:
Understand how this happened: Is there an issue with your email content? Are all email addresses in your contact list clean?
Request blacklist removal
Take actions to prevent this from happening again
Review your email practices.
Check to see if your domain is on a blacklist: https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
How Do I Best Avoid Spam Traps?
Sometimes a bad email address can spoil the entire basket. You can steer clear of spam traps by following a few best practices.
Regularly clean your lists.
See if there are suspect email addresses like signup@spammymail.com on your list.
Always obtain consent by ensuring all emails have a double opt-in.
Avoid spam words in subject lines and email copy.
Don't email your list too frequently.
Send re-engagement campaigns to subscribers, inactive in the last 6 months.
Remove subscribers who do not respond to the re-engagement campaigns to weed out any contacts that could be spam traps.
Spam aside, it’s more than okay to trim your mailing list. It’s okay to ask people to unsubscribe from your emails.
You can protect yourself against spam, too:
Don’t open links in spam mails.
Numbers and special characters in your email address can help protect you against spambots. Spam is sent with the help of bots that generate mail addresses at random, i.e. combine well-known names with various domains.
Our Email Hygiene Service Can Help You Avoid More than Just a Spam Trap
Spam complaints? Invalid emails? Spam traps? If that sounds familiar, then we can help. Using our email suppression database, we cross-reference email addresses and clean your list. This means we look for non-compliant email addresses, which can affect your email domain and sender reputation, and remove them.
With our automated Email Verification Service you can quickly verify the email addresses you are about to send your marketing campaigns – right before your email messages go out.
