Escape Spam Traps: Essential Practices for Email Marketers

Reading Time: 6 minutes

What happens if you keep adding new items to your fridge without taking out the outdated items? Rotten veggies start to smell, you no longer know what is good and what’s expired, and that bacon you brought months ago with a specific recipe in mind is just using up freezer space. If only there was a way to automatically check refrigerator supplies and churn out older and expired items without you having to lift a finger! For email marketers, this kind of problem arises when email lists are left unattended, and they trigger spam traps.

But how do you know your list quality is going downhill? You can look at the percentage of invalid addresses, the sender’s reputation, and the sender score of the IP addresses to see if you are hitting spam traps.

What Are Spam Traps?

Each spam trap is a spy created by mailbox providers to catch spam. Jokes aside, spam traps are honeypot email addresses that are either created or repurposed by mailbox providers to assess the list management practices of email senders and to catch spam.

The main purpose of spam traps is to identify email senders who have questionable list collection and management practices.

One key quality of spam traps is that they are valid email addresses. Emails are delivered to spam traps the same way they are delivered to other legitimate email addresses, making it impossible to identify a spam trap. This is to ensure spammers can not identify spam traps.

If there were loopholes for avoiding spam traps without following a list of hygiene and deliverability best practices, it would not be effective in identifying spammers. This is why email validation tools often do not catch all spam traps.

However, spam traps never engage with emails, so you can analyze email engagement data to identify spam traps.

Why Is It Important To Avoid Spam Traps?

Spam traps, as the name suggests, are traps designed to catch spam. If you do not clean your list frequently, your list will continue to grow the number of spam trap email addresses. When this happens, you will no longer know if your sender reputation is affected or if anti-spam organizations have already flagged you for sending unsolicited emails.

Eventually, you will no longer be able to identify which cohort of email addresses are spam trap addresses, which ones are genuine subscribers, which ones are only generating negative engagement, and which ones are no longer interested in your brand. All of these affect your sender’s reputation and email deliverability.

Types Of Spam Traps

From poor customer email collection methods to a lack of list hygiene or a lack of sunsetting, there can be multiple ways in which a list quality can drop. Accordingly, multiple types of spam traps are created to flag different types of issues:

1. Pristine spam trap
2. Recycled spam trap
3. Typo spam trap

These are explained below in decreasing order of severity.

1. Pristine Spam Traps

Pristine spam traps are what you can also call “pure spam traps.” They are created and maintained by mailbox providers to identify spammers. A pristine spam trap is not a fake email address; rather, it’s created by a mailbox provider for a specific purpose and left on the internet.

The only way to avoid this kind of spam trap is by sending your emails to legitimate senders who have clearly opted in to your emails.

If your emails consistently hit pristine spam traps, it’s a tell-tale sign that your email list collection methods are off. You might also be sending emails to a contact list of unsolicited customers or simply sending spammy emails to your existing customers.

Typically, pristine traps end up in your list if you purchased lists or scraped email addresses or a contact list from public forums.

2. Recycled Spam Traps

Mailbox providers suspend email addresses that have been inactive for a long time. When this happens, these emails are hard-bounced. Brands should suppress these permanently; if not, they will be converted into spam traps.

A recycled trap was once a legitimate email address. Some email validation tools use this pre-existing pool of invalid customers to flag recycled spam traps and protect their sender’s reputation.

Senders who have good list hygiene and don’t send unsolicited emails will never face a recycled spam trap. If you’re consistently hitting recycled spam traps, it is a sign of poor list hygiene.

Recycled traps are typically indicative of purchased lists, usage of an old email address, lack of sunsetting, or issues with suppression policies.

Pro Tip: While migrating from one vendor to another, ensure that you are migrating either all suppressed addresses or the most recent (last 3-6 months) engaged and delivered users. Otherwise, you will end up with high recycled traps and a bad audience quality.

3. Typo Spam Traps

These are the least serious kind of spam traps. That means, amongst all kinds of spam traps, typo spam traps trigger the least amount of spam filters and have a lesser impact on your email deliverability.

Typo traps are simply misspelled email addresses or email addresses created with a minor mistake. Some common examples include: [email protected] instead of [email protected], or [email protected] instead of [email protected].

A typo spam trap can get into your email list when customers misspell their email address while opting in.

As a legitimate sender, to prevent spam traps like these, you should ask for double opt-ins or prompt customers to re-enter their email address when you’re building a contact list.

What Happens If You Send Emails To Spam Trap Email Addresses?

Spam traps are created to flag spammers. If you consistently hit spam traps, you would be deemed a spammer. When this happens, all emails from your domain/IP will be treated as spam by internet service providers (ISPs).

The only way spam traps could get into your contact list is if your audience collection methods are not clean or secure, if you purchase lists, do not suppress invalid customers, or if you do not sunset subscribers due to inactivity.

All such practices and invalid contact lists are flagged by internet service providers. Over time, these behaviors negatively affect your domain’s sender reputation.

Moreover, your sending IP address will be flagged for sending spam. Your delivery rates could drop, and your emails will be sent to the junk folder. If your email messages go to the spam folder, engagement rates and sending reputation will take a direct hit.

Emails from your IP/domain might be rejected, rate-limited, or sent directly to the spam folder. Your overall domain and IP reputation will decrease. Essentially, in varying degrees, the impact could be:

• Delayed delivery (emails would get rate-limited and deferred)
• Low delivery (emails would get soft bounced, i.e., will not be delivered)
• Low engagement (emails would be sent to the spam folder)
• Drop in the domain and IP reputation.

How To Avoid Spam Traps

The short answer is to have a better list management process. To prevent spam traps, you need to ensure that every email address is collected with explicit consent, keep delivery rates and engagement rates high, suppress invalid email addresses, and permanently remove subscribers who do not engage.

If you still see issues or need to clean your existing list, take assistance from other organizations for list validation, followed by re-permissions, while employing double opt-in for new sign-ups.

To summarize, these three steps help avoid falling for spam traps while also keeping your list healthy.

• Secure your email address collection methods via double opt-in
• Suppress hard bounces immediately and suppress repeated soft bounces
• Sunset the address of a customer who has not engaged in over nine months.

Confirmed opt-ins prevent recycled spam traps as well as typo and pristine spam traps. This also helps ensure that your sender’s list only contains customers who want to hear from you, so your engagement and conversion rates will be much higher.

It’s also a good idea to suppress role addresses. Some organizations even use role addresses like [email protected] or [email protected] as traps.

Pro Tip: If you have not sent emails in a long while (3+ months) or have consistently faced issues with block lists despite having a well-crafted email strategy, consider getting re-permission to affirm opt-in.

Wrapping Up

To summarize, ensure your list management strategy is aiding your email deliverability. Secure your email signup forms, stick to permission-based email marketing, remove inactive subscribers, never use purchased lists, remove outdated emails, do not pull email addresses by scraping sites like public websites, and so on. This will automatically prevent spam traps from getting into your list.

All in all, stay away from any suspicious methods to inflate your email contact lists.

Your email address collection points should be secure and there should be mechanisms, be it double opt-in or onboarding lifecycle journey post-sign-up, to identify a real person interested in your brand, instead of invalid email addresses or inactive subscribers, which could be a spam trap.

After gathering contacts, you keep an eye on their behavior, engage them, reengage them, and when that doesn’t work, suppress them permanently. Outdated email addresses are turned into a spam trap to catch spammers. Stay ahead of the curve.

Overwhelmed? Talk to MoEngage!