AWS Messaging & Targeting Blog
What is a spam trap and why you should care
Introduction
While there are many variations of spam traps, they all share one thing in common: they are all addresses that should not be receiving mail. According to Spamhaus, an industry leader in anti-spam efforts that many ISPs and email service providers refer to and ingest spam trap listing data from, “A spam trap is an email address traditionally used to expose illegitimate senders who add email addresses to their lists without permission. They effectively identify email marketers with poor permission and list management practices.” (https://www.spamhaus.com/resource-center/spamtraps-fix-the-problem-not-the-symptom/). Having been identified as sending mail to a spam trap, a sender may find that a significant portion of their mail will be blocked until the listing has been addressed and removed.
By following the best practices outlined in this post, starting with ensuring you are only sending high quality mail to those that have explicitly requested it and continue to find value in it, you can reduce the potential of sending to a spam trap and avoiding the negative impacts that event can cause.
Spam traps are secret, on purpose
The owners of spam traps keep them secret and never reveal them; this is by design. If a spam trap were to be identified then those not following best practices could simply filter and remove that address from lists thus defeating their purpose. The creation and use of spam traps is to highlight possible issues with data collection, list management, and list hygiene. A sender who has sent to a spam trap may be tempted to try to locate and delete a specific spam trap or traps but this doesn’t solve the issue and is highly unlikely to succeed.
What impact can sending to a spam trap have
The impact can vary, depending on items such as the type of trap you sent to, how many times you sent to it, and how the spam trap owner handles these events. It might result in an immediate, public listing on an RBL (real-time block list). ISPs and email providers subscribe to various block lists as a means of supplementing their own anti-spam methods and processes and often move to block mail from both domains and IP addresses identified as sending to spam traps. For some senders, a public RBL listing will result in a significant amount of their mail being blocked. As email is typically a vital part of how business today operates, this could be devastating and difficult to manage after the fact.
Types of spam traps
Below are many of the most common types of spam traps, but this is not an exhaustive list.
- Classic or Pure Spam traps – Classic spam traps are email addresses that were not created or used by a live person, nor available on any website. In some cases, these are addresses at domains that accept mail to any address before the @ (wildcard domains: e.g., *@example.com).
- Seeded Traps – Seeded traps are email addresses that anti-spam organizations and others create and purposely plant in various locations online in non-obvious places. The purpose of this “seeding” is to identify when a sender is scraping addresses across the internet and/or has purchased a list from someone who has. This process highlights senders who are sending mail without consent and may not be honoring requests to unsubscribe.
- Recycled email addresses – These were once-valid email addresses and are the kind of trap a sender can send to even if every address on their list was originally confirmed opt-in. Recycled spam traps are often quite old addresses that were no longer in use or abandoned by the original owner. Abandoned for so long, in fact, the provider has repurposed it as a trap to identify senders who have not properly maintained the hygiene of their sending lists. This indicates a sender has not been active in keeping lists up to date and pruning inactive subscribers or bounced emails. Often, as part of repurposing these addresses, the provider will ensure the address will bounce for 12 months or more, indicating to the sender that the address is no longer valid and only moving to listing the spam trap and sender after having given them that grace period.
- Typo traps – Email addresses that have a typo in the domain, such as @gmial or @yaho, instead of @gmail or @yahoo respectively. These may also be typos in the username, before the @. These may occur when email addresses are collected offline and entered into a database later, or potentially entered incorrectly by the user themselves and was not confirmed. These traps are quite common, but are not “pure” spam traps and anti-spam organizations typically weigh them with this in mind.
- Fake addresses – Registration and shopping cart forms often attract fake email addresses. Perhaps an offer is presented on a site that requires an entry, wherein someone enters submits an address like fakeaddress@fakeaddress.com, which may very well be a spam trap address.
How to avoid sending to spam traps
The first step to avoiding sending to a spam trap is to ensure you are only sending mail to those that have explicitly requested it. Your subscribers should find value in your mail and should fully expect to receive it. The key is getting permission from those users and meeting those expectations. It is strongly recommended that you implement confirmed opt-in or double opt-in, the process of sending a message to the address provided that contains a link or other mechanism for the subscriber to confirm that they approve of the subscription. If there is no response received, that address should not be sent any further mail.
Do not purchase a sending list from a third party. It should go without saying, considering the first step above, however, some senders may be tempted to “kick start” their sending with every intention to transition to best practices but just want a quick boost. This will often result in excessive bounces, recipients marking mail as spam (known as complaints), and ending up with spam traps on sending lists.
Once you have an established list of recipients, addresses that have confirmed opt-in to your mail and value the content you are sending, you need to look at your list management. You should be tracking user engagement for things such as: has a recipient opened your mail recently, has a recipient clicked through a link in your mail, has that user logged in to your site or service. With this tracking in place you should be regularly, preferably automatically, pruning your sending list of non-engaged subscribers. It isn’t recommended to send mail to subscribers who have not engaged for 6 months or longer.
You should also be consistently addressing and removing bounce and complaint addresses. As noted, some spam traps may bounce for 12 months or more before going “live” as a spam trap, providing senders ample time to remove a no longer valid address. This involves tracking and monitoring your sending, ingesting that data, and acting upon those events.
Make sure all webforms have been secured by means such as adding CAPTCHA, in conjunction with confirmed opt-in to help prevent bots from maliciously submitting addresses to your sending lists.
You should immediately honor any and all unsubscribe requests. These addresses may be used by real individuals, and that user may very well be involved in anti-spam efforts and organizations themselves in some way. By not honoring an unsubscribe request you may be sending mail to someone who takes part in blocking decisions, or you may end up with excessive complaints that also negatively impact your sending reputation.
What to do if you have sent to a spam trap
If you haven’t already put in place the methods and best practices above to avoid sending to a spam trap, you should work to immediately implement them. You should also regularly perform rigorous reviews of your data collection and verification practices, identifying and addressing any potential areas of concern or lists/subscribers that cannot be sourced and verified. Segment your lists into recipient activity such as opens, clicks and forwards, immediately removing unengaged addresses for a lesser time frame than what you should already have in place. You may consider performing a permission pass, a one-time campaign to recipients (specifically those left after segmenting and removing of all non-verifiable addresses and older non-engaged recipients) providing users the opportunity to confirm that they would still like to receive mail from you. Only those that have confirmed their subscription status should be kept on future sending lists.
In conclusion
Implementing these best practices, before you begin sending in bulk, can be key in gaining and maintaining a quality sending reputation and is a vital part of successful marketing for businesses both large and small. These processes can significantly improve ROI, mail list quality and integrity, and reduce the possibility of sending to a spam trap, resulting in the best chance of getting your mail in the inboxes of your subscribers
For more information on best practices see:
https://docs.thinkwithwp.com/ses/latest/dg/best-practices.html
https://thinkwithwp.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/handling-bounces-and-complaints/
https://thinkwithwp.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/guide-to-maintaining-healthy-email-database/