Spam traps are email addresses that can appear on your email list. They are an email marketer’s worst enemy as they affect email deliverability, hamper sender reputation, and send emails to the spam folder.
Spam traps can be your worst nightmare if you need to email clients in bulk. This guide explains how spam trap email addresses operate, the different types of honeypots, and how to avoid spam traps.
What are Spam Traps?
Spam traps, or honeypots, are email addresses that help identify senders who send spam emails regularly. Internet service providers (ISPs), email providers, and blocklist operators use spam trap email addresses to catch malicious senders.
Spam trap email addresses could have been legitimate at some point but can now be invalid or abandoned by the owner. They might look like an average email address, but they are an elaborate trap hatched by anti-spam organizations to identify illegitimate senders.
Why Do Spam Traps Matter?
As an email marketer, spam traps pose a severe threat to deliverability. They notify mailbox providers who flag your domain and IP address. As a result, your emails are diverted to the junk folder or blocked entirely, negatively affecting your sender reputation.
The intensity of the impact on email deliverability and engagement rates depends on the type of spam trap triggered. For example, pristine spam traps are more dangerous than recycled spam traps. The former can block your IP address and domain immediately, while the latter can send your emails to the junk folder.
Types of Spam Traps
While spam traps come in various shapes and sizes, these are the three most commonly used variants:
Pristine Spam Traps
Pristine spam traps are email addresses explicitly designed for catching spammers. They are not real email addresses and shouldn’t appear on suppression lists. So, how do they appear on an email list?
Pristine spam traps are embedded deep inside website codes. They get picked up when spammers scrape sites to grow their email lists. Most commercially available contact lists contain pristine email traps since the lists are rarely cleaned. Mailbox providers filter and block senders that contact these email addresses.
Pristine spam traps are the most detrimental to your sender reputation, as the only way to trigger them is by scraping websites or buying contact lists. Hitting pristine spam traps is the easiest way to get your domain and IP address blacklisted.
Recycled Spam Traps
Recycled spam traps are invalid or outdated emails that were once legitimate. Inbox service providers use them to catch malicious senders. These spam traps threaten email deliverability and must be removed immediately to prevent long-term damage.
Since real people used these email addresses at some point, the owners might have subscribed to your mailing list. We recommend removing unresponsive emails at the earliest possible time to avoid recycled spam traps. Since removing invalid addresses from an email list takes time, a recycled spam trap is usually more forgiving.
However, contacting invalid email addresses repeatedly can damage your sender reputation over time. Recycled traps accumulate if you don’t clean your mailing list regularly. Keep an eye on the email bounce report, as emailing recycled spam traps results in hard bounces.
Typo Spam Traps
As the name suggests, typo spam traps are email addresses containing a misspelled word. They mimic real email addresses with minor syntax errors. The most common examples include “Gmial”, “Yaho”, and “Oitlook”. Typo spam traps are the easiest to spot and don’t necessarily indicate unscrupulous emailing behavior. However, they are a sign of callousness, which is uncharacteristic of legitimate senders.
How to Avoid Spam Trap Emails
Avoiding spam traps is hardly rocket science. You won’t trigger spam filters if you follow email marketing best practices, including avoiding spam trigger words. Here are our six primary recommendations for avoiding spam traps:
Avoid Buying Email Lists
Commercially available email lists are unverified and usually contain innumerable spam traps. Furthermore, they may include invalid and outdated emails that offer no real benefits. Emailing people without consent can also increase spam complaints, affecting your open and engagement rates.
Validate New Subscribers
Before contacting a new subscriber, ensure the person wants to receive your business correspondence. An email validation and verification API helps protect your suppression list by adding a security layer that automatically rejects catch-alls, misspelled domains, and potentially harmful email addresses.
Set Double Opt-in
Use a double opt-in signup form to ensure you’re adding interested people to your email list. Double opt-ins ask subscribers for consent before adding them to your contacts list. This improves the open, click-through, and engagement rates and reduces hard and soft bounces.
Follow Email Deliverability Metrics
Open rates are an essential indicator of email deliverability. However, they don’t show the entire picture. We recommend analyzing the combined results of open, click-through, and engagement rates and checking the sender reputation to identify whether you’ve hit a spam trap.
Clean Your Email List Regularly
Clean your email list regularly to avoid spam traps. Maintaining good list hygiene is essential for reaching subscribers’ inboxes and staying in touch with people who want to connect with your business. The goal is to improve the quality of subscribers and build your email list sustainably.
Authenticate Your Promotional Emails
Authenticating your brand’s promotional emails won’t reverse the damage caused to your sender reputation or its impact on email deliverability. However, it improves your trust score for future campaigns. Authentication methods like DMARC, DKIM, and SPF help identify and catch spammers.
How to Detect Spam Trap Email Addresses
A blocked domain or IP address and an increased hard bounce are clear signs of spam traps on your mailing list. If you hit a spam trap, it’s time to clean your mailing list thoroughly. Start by removing contacts who have not responded to your emails in six months, and work your way down to three months.
If you have segregated your audience, identify clean lists and set them aside. Continue refining your search queries until you find the spam trap. You can use a backlist monitor that updates at least once every 24 hours for precise results.
Remember, you can only fix a problem that has been found. Hence, if you notice a sudden rise in hard bounces right after a bulk campaign, try finding the email addresses responsible for it. Most mailbox providers offer bounce reports highlighting undelivered email addresses. Use it to check whether it’s just one IP address or a domain-level problem.
Take Advantage of Email Verification Tools
As mentioned, maintaining good list hygiene is the best way to avoid spam traps. A reliable email list improves deliverability and engagement, increasing your outreach and boosting customer loyalty.
Keeping your mailing lists clean is an ongoing effort, as old email addresses are often discarded. For example, employees abandon their old business email addresses when they move to a new organization. Sending emails to these contacts won’t generate responses and will waste your time.
As an email marketer, you need to regularly identify and remove unresponsive email addresses. The more extensive the suppression list, the more challenges you will face. This is where an email list verification tool like Alfred simplifies your job.
About Alfred
Alfred is an all-in-one email verification and threat detection tool trusted by the world’s most respectable email senders. Identify hidden threats, verify bulk email addresses, and confidently send emails using Alfred.
Alfred runs 360-degree performance checks to confirm your emails reach the subscribers’ inboxes. From removing spam traps, zombies, and other bad actors to ensuring your contact lists are cleansed, updated, and safe, Alfred is a one-stop email list cleaning and validation solution.
Moreover, Alfred is committed to the highest standards of data protection and privacy, ensuring all operations are fully GDPR-compliant. This dedication to security means that when you use Alfred for email verification and threat detection, you’re also safeguarding your customers’ data against unauthorized access and breaches.
Improve Email Deliverability and Sender Reputation Now
Following all the best practices can be challenging, especially if you’re learning how to send bulk emails. However, getting your domain or IP address flagged by a spam filter can severely hamper your business.
Email Industries’ end-to-end deliverability and management services help increase user engagement sustainably. Book a discovery call today to learn how our experts can help clean your mailing lists and avoid spam traps in the future.
Head of Growth at Email Industries