traps: What are they? How to avoid them (2023)
Spam traps could seriously impact your email deliveryability. If you want to be serious about your email marketing efforts you should know how to avoid them.
This guide will teach you everything you need to know about spam traps, and how you can prevent them from causing damage.
What is a Spam Trap?
Spam traps are email addresses that Internet Service Providers use to identify spammers or users not following email marketing best practice.
Spam traps may look like real email addresses but they can’t be used for any type of communication. They are used to trap spammers and prevent them from sending messages. Spam trap addresses can’t opt-in to receive email messages, so any message sent from such an address will be flagged as spammer.
Spam Traps
You can find many spam traps, and you don’t have to do anything wrong. Each spam trap is unique and can cause different damage.
Let’s now see the differences between each type.
The Most Precious Spam Traps
These email addresses, also known as pure spam traps or pristine spam traps, have been created by ISPs and other organizations but they’ve never been used. These email addresses can be embedded on public websites but are hidden in the code.
These spam traps can only be found in your email address if spammers scrape sites for emails or someone buys contact lists. These spam traps are an indicator that ISPs can spot suspicious senders by revealing their methods of collecting contacts.
You can see that hitting a pristine trap can have the greatest impact upon your sending reputation. In particular, sending emails to a pristine spam trap could result in your domain and/or sending IP address being blocked.
Recycled Spamtraps
Recycled spam traps, also known as honeypots, were once valid email addresses that were used by real people. However, they have been abandoned by their providers and repurposed to catch spammers. Examples include email addresses that have no employees or are role-based (e.g. sales@, info@ and support@).
If your email list is older than one year or you don’t send emails to it often, a recycled spam trap could be on your list.
A recycled trap indicates that you aren’t regularly removing inactive subscribers or managing hard bounces. The consequences of sending spam to recycled spam traps emails are “milder”.
If you send email to these addresses often, your emails could begin getting sent to the junk folder . They can also damage your reputation as a sender over time.
Typo Spam Traps
Spam traps may also appear in email addresses that have common typos such as “gnail” instead “gmail” or even “yaho” instead “yahoo”. These spam traps are similar to recycled spam traps but they are often set up by email providers to monitor email best practices. They can sometimes be caused by an error made by someone signing up for your newsletter.
This category also includes fake email addresses, like “[email protected],” or “[email protected],” which are often entered into online forms and shopping carts when email confirmation isn’t required.
These spam traps have no negative consequences. They can identify the sender as being negligent in cleaning their contacts and damage their sending reputation.
How to Prevent Spam Traps
We have already discussed the different types of spam traps that you might encounter in the past section. Preventing is better than treating! We’ll share some tips to help you avoid spam traps.
Don’t Buy Email Lists
Spam traps are almost always a problem with purchased lists of email addresses. These lists may contain email addresses that have never opted in to receive your email campaigns. Additionally, subscribers to these lists could mark your emails as spam because they don’t know anything about your brand. These actions can negatively impact your sender reputation as well as email deliveryability.
You should also remember that there are laws in place to protect users from spammers. These laws are known as GDPR. The number one rule of GDPR is to not buy email lists. This means that you must get permission from people before you can email them.
Double Opt in
To ensure that real people subscribe to your list, the number one thing to do is to use double-opt-in. Before you send them marketing emails, recipients must confirm their email address immediately.
Double opt-in ensures that you have a healthy email database with valid email addresses. It also increases overall engagement which is a positive signal to ISPs.
When designing signup forms, make sure you enable double opt in.
Remove Inactive Subscribers
To prevent spam traps, remove subscribers who have stopped being active or engaged. Every six months, give your list a thorough pruning.
Spam traps can sometimes be caused by invalid email addresses. send re-engagement emails to subscribers that have not interacted with your content within the past few months. These campaigns may not work. If they don’t, you should get rid of inactive subscribers. They are bad for your business as well as your list hygiene.
Moosend allows you to create an automation for removing inactive subscribers. This way you won’t need to worry and there is a system that will protect you. It’s easy to set it and forget about it.
All the details can be found in our cleaning guide.
Verify your Mailing List
It’s a smart idea to do email verification if you haven’t sent emails in a while or you have added subscribers manually to your list. Email validation tools automatically reject abusive, misspelled, and catch-all accounts that could harm your sender reputation.
Email validation software can be integrated into subscription forms to verify the legitimacy of email addresses. This will prevent typos and ensure that you don’t have any.
Takeaway
Spam trap email addresses can slowly send your emails to the spam folder, or do major damage and land you in a blocklist. The steps you can take are simple and effective to stop this from happening.
Do not buy email lists to boost your growth. Instead, build organically. Double opt-in is a good idea for forms.
Last but not least, Moosend is an email marketing platform that you can trust. Register today to get started. You can rely on our team to assist you in setting up your email marketing software for success.
The post SpamTraps: Definition, Types and How to Avoid (2023) was first published on Email Marketing Automation Platform For Thriving Business.
