Three things marketers should do when domains are retired

Denied
A few weeks ago I was alerted to a domain change for INGDirect. The ingdirect.com domain is being retired and all users are migrating to the capitalone.com domain. As part of this change usernames are NOT being transferred, so if you have @ingdirect.com addresses on any B2B mailing list, you will need to drop those addresses and find the new contact information for the subscriber.

What should marketers do when domains are retired?

  1. If the retirement is announced publicly before the domain is actually retired, send a special campaign to those subscribers asking for their updated information. Not all retirements are public, so that leads us to my second recommendation.
  2. Have an easy way for recipients to change their email address. Loren McDonald just went through an email address change and blogged about how difficult it was for him to change his email address on many mailing lists. These are subscribers that want to stay on your list, make it as easy as possible for them to do so.
  3. Check your database for addresses in that domain and make sure there is no way they can be mailed in the future. Relying on your bounce handler to invalidate the addresses isn’t enough. Failing to correctly invalidate addresses correctly means you’re at risk if a domain is turned on or donated to a filtering company. In fact, a couple of the biggest spam trap feeds around are former corporate domains removed from circulation for 3 or 4 years and then turned back on.

Domains go in and out of circulation all the time. Effective marketers have plans in place to deal with those issues as they happen.

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Spamtraps, again.

The DMA and EEC hosted a webinar today discussing spam traps. Overall, I thought it was pretty good and the information given out was valuable for marketers.
My one big complaint is that they claimed there were only two kinds of spam traps, and then incorrectly defined one of those types. They split spam traps into “pristine” and “recycled.” Pristine traps were defined as addresses that never belonged to a user, but were seeded out on the internet to catch people harvesting addresses off websites.
While dropping addresses on websites is one way people create spam traps, there are uncounted numbers of traps that receive spam (even from some big name brands) that have never been published anywhere. One very common source of trap addresses is Usenet message IDs. I don’t think anyone can really say these were seeded in an effort to catch people harvesting, they were part of posting to Usenet. Another common source of trap addresses is spammers creating email addresses; they take the left hand side of every address on a list and pair that with all the unique right hand sides of the same list. Massive list growth with a chance that some of those addresses will be valid.
I’ve talked about different kinds of spamtraps in depth previously and how the different traps are used in different ways. I also talked about how those different types of traps tell the recipients different things.
Another critical thing to remember about traps is they are not the problem. Spamtrap hits are a symptom of a larger problem with your list acquisition process. Every spam trap on your list is a failure to actually connect with a recipient. If you’re using an opt-in method to collect addresses traps mean that either a user didn’t really want to opt in or you managed to not accurately collect their information.
One of the things I get frustrated with when dealing with potential customers is their laser like focus on “getting the traps off our list.” I really believe that is not the right approach. Just getting the traps off is not going to do anything to improve your delivery over the long term. Instead of focusing on the traps, focus on the reasons they’re there. Look at how you can improve your processes and address collection so that you actually get the correct addresses of the people who really do want that mail.
Other posts about spam traps

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The true facts of spam traps and typo traps

I’m seeing an increase in the number of articles stating wildly wrong things about spam traps. Some have started claiming that typo traps are new. Or that typo traps are newly used by Spamhaus. These claims make for great copy, I guess. Wild claims about how the evil anti-commerce self-appointed internet police are actively trying to trap marketers get clicks. These claims also reinforce the martyr complex some senders have and gives them something to commiserate about over drinks at the next email conference.
I strongly recommend ignoring any article that claims Spamhaus started using typo traps in December 2012. In fact, you can immediately dismiss absolutely everything they have to say. They are wrong and have proven they can’t be bothered to do any fact checking.
I can’t figure out why so many people repeat the same false statements over and over and over again. They’re wrong, and no amount of explaining the truth seems to make any difference. I went looking for evidence.
First, I asked on Facebook. A bunch of my contacts on Facebook have have been running spam traps for a long time. Multiple people commented that they, personally, have been using typos to track spam since the late ’90s. These typos were on both the right hand side of the @ sign (the domain side) but also on the left hand side of the @ sign (the username).
Then, I looked through my archives of one of the anti-spam mailing lists and I see a Spamhaus volunteer mentioning that he had already been using typo traps in 2007.  I asked him about this and he pointed out these are some of his older traps and had been around for many years before that mention. 
Of course, we’ve written about typo domains used by an anti-spam group to catch spam.
The truth is, typo traps are not new and they’re not a new set of traps for Spamhaus. I’ve talked about traps over and over again. But I’m seeing more and more articles pop up that make verifiably wrong statements about spam traps. Here are a few facts about spam traps.
 

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It's about the spam

Tell someone they have hit a spamtrap and they go through a typical reaction cycle.
Denial: I didn’t hit a trap! I only send opt-in mail. There must be some mistake. I’m a legitimate company, not a spammer!
Anger: What do you mean that I can’t send mail until I’ve fixed the problem? There is no problem! You can’t stop me from mailing. I’m following the law. My mail is important. I’ll sue.
Bargaining: What if I just send mail to some recipients? What if I hire an email hygiene company to remove traps from my list?
Acceptance: What can I do to make sure the people I’m mailing actually want to be on my list?
Overall, my problem with the focus on spamtraps (and complaints to a lesser extent) is that these metrics are proxies. Spamtraps are a way to objectively monitor incoming email. Mail sent to spamtraps is, demonstrably, sent without permission of the address owner. This doesn’t mean all mail from the same source is spam, but there is proof at least some of the mail is spam.
If there is enough bad mail on that list, then reworking the subscription process may be necessary to fix delivery.

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