Equivocating about spamtraps

What is a spamtrap? According to a post I saw on Twitter:

By definition, a spam trap is an email address maintained by an ISP or third party, which neither clicks nor opens emails, meaning it does not actively engage with the emails it receives.

That’s not the definition of a spamtrap at all.
A spam trap is an email address that does not belong to an actual person but still receives unsolicited bulk / commercial email. The usefulness of a trap is that there is no discussion about whether or not the recipient asked to receive the email. As no one owns that address, it could never legitimately be signed up to receive email.
Can someone else sign it up for email? Yes, but that’s not a legitimate opt-in.
Can some spammer create the email address? Yes, but that’s not a legitimate opt-in.
Can the address be scraped off a website? Yes, but that’s not a legitimate opt-in.
If you’re sending mail to an address without a legitimate opt-in, then you’re sending spam.
Traps are used as a way to identify senders who are sending mail without permission. The presence of a trap does not mean that the whole list is bad. It does not mean that no one gave permission to receive mail from that sender. But the presence of a trap does mean there is some problem with list management and hygiene resulting in some people getting mail they never asked to receive.
But the never existing address is only one type of trap. Some ISPs, and individuals, repurpose abandoned email addresses in order to identify poor senders. Sometimes they bounce emails to these addresses before repurposing them. Sometimes they just pull the MX out of DNS. Sometimes they just stop using it for a long period of time. In any case the idea is that any legitimate senders (personal correspondents and such) have stopped using that address and have moved onto whatever the new person’s email address is. After a certain period of time, anyone sending mail to that address doesn’t have any permission to send mail there. For bulk mail that implies the sender is spamming.
I am generally very careful in my language when talking with people. I don’t use the generic term spam trap very often, but instead talk about how an address might have gotten onto a list without permission.
For instance, I consider my original .com address a trap these days. I stopped signing it up to mailing lists sometime in the late 90s and while I still get some email there (primarily from discussion lists) anything commercial is spam because I didn’t ask for it. But when I’m reporting it I tell the upstream abuse address “this is an address I stopped using prior to 2000.”
I also have traps that are addresses that were only ever published on websites (mostly contact addresses) but those websites are no longer live. When I am reporting spam to those addresses I say “this is a contact address only used on a website and never used to sign up for mail.”
I have traps that are addresses that have never existed. Some of the web scrapers that spammers were using were so broken they created addresses that delivered to me. I have one that is infoggnn@. This is not a valid address, has never been a valid address, has never had a person behind it, but I still get tons of spam to it. When I am reporting spam to those addresses I say “this is an address created by a spammer when scraping another address off my website.”
I try to be clear in my language, but the reality is all of these addresses are spamtraps. They are addresses I never gave to anyone for commercial email. Even the address from pre-2000 wasn’t used to sign up for commercial mailing lists. I had a hotmail address I used at the time for commercial mail.
Spamtraps are not addresses that simply don’t engage with mail. In fact, there are some traps that will pull images and click on links. Not many, not frequently, but it is a false assumption that traps never engage with mail.
While I try to be clear when discussing different kinds of traps, I have to wonder why I spend so much time explaining and sidestepping calling the mail spam. It’s an address that delivers to me. I never gave it to whomever is sending to it. I never consented to receive mail there. So why am I protecting the spammer by pretending there’s some innocent explanation for why they’re spamming me?
More on Spamtraps

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Would you buy a used car from that guy?

There are dozens of people and companies standing up and offering suggestions on best practices in email marketing. Unfortunately, many of those companies don’t actually practice what they preach in managing their own email accounts.
I got email today to an old work email address of mine from Strongmail. To be fair it was a technically correct email. Everything one would expect from a company handling large volumes of emails.  It’s clear that time and energy was put into the technical setup of the send. If only they had put even half that effort into deciding who to send the email to. Sadly, they didn’t.
My first thought, upon receiving the mail, was that some new, eager employee bought a very old and crufty list somewhere. Because Strongmail has a reputation for being responsible mailers, I sent them a copy of the email to abuse@. I figured they’d want to know that they had a new sales / marketing person who was doing some bad stuff.
I know how frustrating handling abuse@ can be, so I try to be short and sweet in my complaints. For this one, I simply said, “Someone at Strongmail has appended, harvested or otherwise acquired an old email address of mine. This has been added to your mailing list and I’m now receiving spam from you. ”
They respond with an email that starts with:
“Thank you for your thoughtful response to our opt-in request. On occasion, we provide members of our database with the opportunity to opt-in to receive email marketing communications from us.”
Wait. What? Members of our database? How did this address get into your database?
“I can’t be sure from our records but it looks like someone from StrongMail reached out to you several years ago.  It’s helpful that you let us know to unsubscribe you.  Thank you again.”
There you have it. According to the person answering email at abuse@ Strongmail they sent me a message because they had sent mail to me in the past. Is that really what you did? Send mail to very old email addresses because someone, at some point in the past, sent mail to that address? And you don’t know when, don’t know where the address came from, don’t know how it was acquired, but decided to reach out to me?
How many bad practices can you mix into a single send, Strongmail? Sending mail to addresses where you don’t know how you got them? Sending mail to addresses that you got at least 6 years ago? Sending mail to addresses that were never opted-in to any of your mail? And when people point out, gently and subtly, that maybe this is a bad idea, you just add them to your global suppression list?
Oh. Wait. I know what you’re going to tell me. All of your bad practices don’t count because this was an ‘opt-in’ request. People who didn’t want the mail didn’t have to do anything, therefore there is no reason not to spam them! They ignore it and they are dropped from your list. Except it doesn’t work that way. Double opt-in requests to someone has asked to be subscribed or is an active customer or prospect is one thing. Requests sent to addresses of unknown provenance are still spam.
Just for the record, I have a good idea of where they got my address. Many years ago Strongmail approached Word to the Wise to explore a potential partnership. We would work with and through Strongmail to provide delivery consulting and best practices advice for their customers. As part of this process we did exchange business cards with a number of Strongmail employees. I suspect those cards were left in a desk when the employees moved on. Whoever got that desk, or cleaned it out, found  those cards and added them to the ‘member database.’
But wait! It gets even better. Strongmail was sending me this mail, so that they could get permission to send me email about Email and Social Media Marketing Best Practices. I’m almost tempted to sign up to provide me unending blog fodder for my new series entitled “Don’t do this!”

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Are you sure? Part 2

There was a bit of discussion about yesterday’s blog post over on my G+ circles. One person was telling me that “did you forget you opted-in?” was a perfectly valid question. He also commented he’s had the same address for 20 years and that he does, sometimes forget he opted in to mail years ago.
As an anti-spammer with the idea that it’s all about consent, I can see his point. Anti-spammers, for years, have chanted the mantra: “it’s about consent, not content.” Which is a short, pithy way to say they don’t care what you send people, as long as the recipients themselves have asked for it.
This is the perfect bumper sticker policy. As with most bumper sticker policies, though, it’s too short to deal with the messy realities.
I’m not knocking consent. Consent is great. Every bulk mailer should only be sending mail to people who have asked or agreed to receive that mail.
But if your focus is on delivery and getting mail to the recipient’s inbox and getting the recipient to react to that mail then you can’t just fall back on consent. You have to send them mail that they expect. You have to send them mail that they like. You have to send them mail they will open, read and interact with.
If your permission based recipients are saying they forgot that they signed up for mail, that is a sign that the sender’s program is futile. These are people who, at one point or another, actually asked to receive mail from a sender, and then the mail they receive is so unremarkable that they totally forget about the sender.
Maybe that’s another reason the question “are you sure you didn’t forget you opted in” from clients bothers me so much. If I signed up and forgot that points to problems in your program, mostly that it’s totally unremarkable and your subscribers can forget.

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Nothing is forever, even email

Yesterday I talked about how important it was to send welcome messages when you discover old email addresses. Today on the Return Path Blog, Tami Monahan Foreman shares an example email that does just that, but not as well as one might hope.

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