A spam trap is a unique email address that looks like a real person’s email address, but it is actually a fake. It’s created by ISPs or security platforms, and they’re designed to catch spammers. In order to keep the spam from circulating, the operator has to make the spam trap as undetectable as possible.
Spam traps can lead to poor deliverability and lowered open rates. They can also damage the reputation of senders. If a sender hits a spam trap, their domains can be blacklisted. This will make it difficult to get the word out about your products or services. To avoid getting caught up in a spam trap, keep your contact list up to date.
One way to find out whether or not your contact list is contaminated with spam traps is to run a secondary scan. Using a valid email, you can see what your spam filtering system is doing. You might even be able to identify a small group of spam traps.
There are two basic types of spam traps: recycled and pristine. The latter is much more difficult to detect. Recycled spam traps are used by spammers and are often deactivated, while pristine spam traps are created in secret.
Some anti-spam organizations will help you track down spam traps. However clean spam traps, these organizations aren’t likely to provide the full data set necessary to blacklist a sending domain. For this reason, the best solution is probably to use a validation service. These companies can detect fake or abandoned spam traps. Also, they can grade your contact records to determine their level of validity.
Depending on the severity of the spam trap, the penalties can range from minor to extreme. For example, if you hit a major ISP’s spam trap, you might be permanently blacklisted. Other measures include greylisting, which temporarily rejects a sender’s messages.
Spam traps are a sign of poor lead collection and maintenance practices. In addition to cleaning up your contact lists, you should implement good email marketing campaign etiquette. Avoid typos, maintain a healthy contact list, and use a confirmed opt-in process to prevent unwanted addresses from ending up in your list.
If you have a large number of outdated contacts in your contact list, you should consider purging them. The problem with this method is that if your contacts are old and inactive, they might have changed their email addresses. That’s one of the reasons why list hygiene is so important.
Another method to identify and remove spam traps is to segment your list. Segmenting your contacts into highly targeted segments can help you locate spam traps. Similarly, if you have a large list of contacts who haven’t opened an email in over a year, you might want to remove them. Not only can removing entire lists be a bad idea, it might also miss some of the bigger fish.
Finally, it’s worth noting that although a spam trap is a cool-looking email address, it’s not necessarily something that will benefit your company. Identifying and removing these traps will go a long way to improving your deliverability and ensuring that your contacts have a positive experience with your emails.