A Crash Course on Spam Traps: Everything You Need to Know

If you’re trying to understand what spam traps are & why you should care about them, you’re in the right place.

If that doesn’t describe you, I honestly don’t know how you found this page. In either case, I hope you’re having a great day and you’ll consider reading this information I put together about spam traps and deliverability. I’ve been an email marketer for over a decade, so hopefully this helps!  

What Is Spam? 

A good place to start when trying to understand “spam traps” is to fist understand spam itself. The definition widely accepted in regards to email, is an unsolicited email.

If you’re wondering if it’s called spam after the canned meat product, SPAM, you would be correct. There is a WONDERFUL podcast episode from the show ‘Brought to You By‘ called A Tale of Two Spams. It’s a history lesson on the internationally know canned meat product that’s quite entertaining.

Enough about that, you’re here for email help, not canned meat. 

Spam vs. Malware & Phishing

Malicious messages like phishing and malware are terrible and I hope that if you’re reading this, you’re not one of the people who sends those types of messages. Although those certainly are a type of spam, they are a sinister subset of the broader spam ecosystem.

For the purposes of this post, let’s assume you’re not sending phishing and malware emails and you’re a normal person trying to get your email content seen.

What Are They & Why Do They Exist?

If everyone followed the rules, spam traps wouldn’t exist. 

Think about the early days of commercial electronic mail (Isn’t it fun to call email electronic?). At first, it was a few early adopters using this fun new technology, but just like any new media, shady operators found a way in. Suddenly there were Nigerian princes needing wire transfers and your grandson need cash, fast! These scams are designed to rob people of their money, privacy, and safety.

Once this happened, email providers (like Gmail, Hotmail, AOL) needed to stop their customers from being taken advantage of. To solve the problem, several techniques were deployed to detect spammers. A common practice was to monitor the content of the email by looking for words like “Nigerian prince” and block those messages.

Another technique deployed was to identify the person who was actually sending the email. Both practices left a lasting impact on the email ecosystem, but for the purposes of this post, we’ll focus on how spam is detected by identifying the sender.

If Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and email platforms like Gmail can isolate who’s sending the spam, they’re less vulnerable to another scam from the same sender.

Which leads us to the spam trap. 

A spam trap is an email address that isn’t an actual user on the receiving end. Spam traps are used to see if you are sending emails to fake addresses. Email providers, ISPs, and spam trap monitors are essentially setting up small sting operations in order to catch the bad actors of the email world.

 

Different Types of Spam Traps

Now that you understand the purpose of spam traps, there’s an important distinction that needs to be made about the types of spam traps in circulation. The two primary types of spam traps in circulation are Pristine and Recycled spam traps. Based upon which type of trap is set helps the email platforms identify just how bad of a sender you are.

Pure Spam Traps

These types of spam traps go by many different names: pristine, clean, seeded, or classic spam traps. They’re usually created by an email platform or ISP and are never actually created by an individual. 

These traps are primarily created to catch you using poor practices to grow your email list. 

Once the email address is created, it’s published in different places on the internet. Once the email address is published for the world to see and begins receiving email, this shows that people are scraping the email addresses without consent and adding them to an email list. 

There are robots that search the internet looking for an @ symbol and pull those email addresses onto lists. Sending to email addresses collected in this way is very risky business. You have no way to know for sure if you’re collecting a spam trap in the process. 

Since almost every email provider and ISP are distributing spam traps in this way, your entire list could be at risk. If you need to grow your email list beyond your organic sources, be sure to partner with a reputable company. Furthermore, the company should have a clear opt-in process so the email addresses you send to belong to real people who opt-in. 

As a side note: be sure to email all of your new addresses (organic or otherwise) as quickly as possible. Waiting hours or days before emailing your subscribers can drastically decrease the effectiveness of your message.

Recycled Spam Traps

The other main type of spam trap is an email address that used to be associated with an actual person. These are also called dead address spam traps or repurposed spam traps. As you may have gathered by now, these spam traps are created by email providers and ISPs after they know one of their accounts is completely inactive.

We all have that first email address we made that makes us embarrassed by how immature we used to be. 

These traps are primarily created to stop poor list hygiene practices. These traps are most often found on lists that are not sufficiently removing the inactive email addresses on your list. This happens when you collect emails over time and you keep sending to everyone on the list, regardless of when they last opened, clicked, or purchased from you.

One of the hardest concepts for most business executives and list owners to come to grips with is the fact that just because someone opted in previously doesn’t mean they want to keep getting your emails. If an email address opted in months ago and hasn’t opened any of your emails, they’re telling you (indirectly) that they don’t care about your messages.

If that happens, mix up your messaging or pull a group of those email addresses into a “lapsed” segment to give them a break from your promotional messages. After giving them a break, send them a special coupon or exclusive content to reinvigorate their engagement with your brand. 

Steering clear of recycled spam traps is simple.

Just maintain a quality, up-to-date email list and you should be good. Furthermore, it’s important to note that these types of spam traps are seen as a lesser violation in the eyes of the email providers and ISPs.  

Usually, sending to these email addresses will only get you in a little trouble. If you keep getting in the same trouble or your violations start to pile up, then you’ll see more drastic punishment from the email provider.

How Do I Know If I’ve Hit a Spam Trap?

Usually, if you hit a spam trap, you’ll be placed on a blacklist.

A blacklist is a dynamic list of suspected spammers that is updated in real-time based upon the sender’s behavior. Some blacklists are public and can be monitored using a blacklist monitor. There are several tools that can be used in order to monitor the presence of your domain or IP address on multiple blacklists. 

If this is something you need for your dedicated IP addresses or your domain, you should take a look at HetrixTools. This tool keeps an eye on IP address blacklists and domain level blacklists and it’s quite affordable. 

There’s no way to monitor private blacklists like Gmail or Hotmail, but there are a few ways to make sure you are in good standing with them. The first is simply to look at your open rates. If the open rates for emails associated with a specific ISP or email provider are substantially lower than other platforms, that can be an indicator.

Other tools you can use to monitor your status for platforms with private blacklists is to monitor your postmaster tools for that platform. The four big email providers, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft (Hotmail and Outlook), all have their own tools for monitoring your reputation with their platform. Here are the links: Gmail Postmaster Tool, Yahoo Postmaster, AOL Postmaster, and Outlook Postmaster. 

What To Do If You Hit a Spam Trap

If you run into reputation issues, you should take them very seriously. The best advice we can provide if this happens is to ask yourself the four Ws. 

Who is the problem email? 

Put your Sherlock Holmes hat on and try to understand which email address is the problem. If you’re hoping the owner of the blacklist will be willing to hand over the email address in question, you’re wrong. It’s in their best interest to keep these spam traps a secret. The answers to the next questions will also help you isolate the issue.   

If you don’t have the time or resources to investigate, you should at least identify the lead source causing the issue. Have you recently turned on a new email acquisition source? Did you buy a list or import a batch of new subscribers into your system? Finding the source is the first step to stop the bleeding.

When did this happen?

If you’re using a blacklist monitor, they’ll provide updates at least every 24 hours. If you know the timing of when you hit the blacklist, it will help you further isolate the problem. Some blacklists allow you to file a delisting request and once filed will send you the header information from the sent email that hit the trap. This generally includes the subject line and time stamp.

What caused this?

Did you send out a large campaign earlier in the morning or did a batch of transactional messages go out that could have caused this? Maybe someone in your company accidentally sent to the wrong list. Finding out the specific email and/or list that got you in trouble is another data point to help you isolate and remove the problem.  

Where did it happen?

It’s important to understand what blacklist or platform is impacted by your problem. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know where that problem is located. If the problem is Gmail, take a look at their postmaster tools and see how bad it is. Also, you should see if this is a domain level problem or just one of your IP addresses.

Once you’ve answered these questions, you should have a good idea of the root cause. From here, it’s time to update your processes. Rethink your audience segmentation, turn off that shady lead source, or rethink your acquisition vendor. 

No matter what needs to be done, it’s important that you just do it. These problems rarely resolve themselves, so it’s up to you. Take a hard look in the mirror and realize that even though it may hurt in the short-term, you are playing a long-term game and your reputation over time is critical.

Tips for Avoiding Spam Traps

Generally speaking, most quality senders won’t encounter spam traps very often because they’ve implemented a quality acquisition strategy with trusted lead sources. They also keep a close eye on their email metrics and audience health. If you don’t have an established list and you need to be more aggressive in your email list growth, here are a few tips to avoid issues before they happen. 

Swiftly Remove Bounces & Invalid Emails

It’s important to automatically remove invalid email addresses from being sent additional times. Some spam traps are created to monitor the emails sent to a mistyped domain name (i.e. gnail.com) so it’s important to only send to those invalid addresses one time. These are commonly referred to as a “hard bounce.” 

Other email addresses that should automatically be removed from your list are email addresses that bounce back after being sent. There are various reasons for the email being sent back, but the most common is that the mailbox is full. These are commonly referred to as a “soft bounce.” Soft bounces can be emailed multiple times, but if you have tried a few times to reach them over the course of 2-3 weeks, it’s time to remove them.

Most email tools have this builtin, so it’s not a heavy lift to accomplish. If you’re looking for an email tool to help with this, I like ConvertKit for bloggers, MailerLite for small businesses, and SendInBlue if you need SMS/chat as well. 

Audience Selection

It’s important to only send emails to your active email list. You need to define what your ‘active list’ is, but a good place to start is to never send to an email address that hasn’t opened OR clicked an email from your brand in six months. 

If the quality of your list is super critical or you’re trying to mend your reputation, consider requiring a double opt-in to be on your list. It’s an effective method to avoid domain-typo spam traps. You won’t get as many people on your list, but your list will be 100% confirmed with an email address that opened AND clicked.

Periodic List Cleaning

Cleaning your list sounds more complicated than it actually is. All it means is that you check each email addresses for its current validity. You do this by using a tool like EmailListVerify.com, NeverBounce, or ZeroBounce and they will ping the server of each email address on your list and provide feedback about each email address. 

Each vendor has slightly different naming conventions, but depending on the type of response from the servers, they’ll tell you if each email address is valid, invalid, or somewhere in between. Email list cleaning is NOT the same as simply removing bounces from your list. That’s a best practice, but for lists that are three months or older, you’ll want to periodically run them through the list cleaning process.

Working with a list cleaning tool doesn’t 100% guarantee that spam traps will be removed, but they certainly increase your chances of avoiding suspicious email addresses. These tools check the validity of the actual domain, the structure of each email address, and the response from the email servers to help you get the best possible list and increase your deliverability. 

If you want to reduce the cost of doing your list cleaning, another option to help keep your list clean is to simply remove your inactive or disengaged subscribers. People create new email address frequently, so keeping someone on your list just because they signed up isn’t a good idea. At a minimum, you should remove subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked an email in the last 12 months. Depending on your specific customer lifecycle and sending frequency, you may want to take that down to as little as six or even three months. 

If you use these tips, keep an eye on blacklists and postmaster tools along with using quality acquisition and sending practices, you’ll be in good shape.

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