Only spamtraps matter, or do they?

I received mail from Mitusbishi UK over the weekend, telling me that as a subscriber I was eligible to buy a car from one of their dealers, or something. I didn’t actually read the whole thing. While I am competent in a right hand drive, even when it’s a manual, it’s not something I want to try over here in the US.
The address the message came to is one that I’ve had for around 15 years now. But it’s not an address I’ve really ever used for anything. When I have used it, the address is tagged. The bare address has never been handed out.
When I sent the report in to SmartFocus, I commented this wasn’t an opt-in address and that it was, in fact, a spamtrap. Is it? Well, it certainly never signed up for UK car offers. Or any UK mail for that matter. I’ve never opted in to things with it. No one before me had the address.
I know why I mentioned it was a spamtrap… because sometimes it seems like the only way to get some senders to pay attention is if you call the address a trap. Mail to actual users is not a problem, it’s only mail to spamtraps that gets some compliance departments interested in an issue. Without the address begin labeled a spamtrap, the address is just marked as “complaint” and removed from further sends.
I wonder if we, and I include myself in that we, have made it harder to deal with spam by focusing on spamtraps rather than permission. Sure, we did it for a good reason – it’s hard to argue that an address that has never been used by a person signed up to receive mail. But now we have companies trying to create and monetize spamtrap networks because people care about spamtraps.
It’s a less conflict laden conversation when we can say “these addresses didn’t opt-in, they don’t exist.” But somehow “spamtrap” carries more weight than “bounce.” I’m not sure that’s a good distinction, bounces are all potential traps, and I do know some people go through their incoming logs and see what addresses they are bouncing mail to and then turn those addresses on.
Focusing on traps makes some conversations easier. But maybe we need to be having harder conversations with clients and senders and marketers. Maybe lack of spamtraps isn’t a sign of a good list. Maybe good lists are quantified by other things, like response and engagement and ROI.

Related Posts

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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Dear Email Address Occupant

There’s a great post over on CircleID from John Levine and his experience with a marketer sending mail to a spam trap.
Apparently, some time back in 2002 someone opted in an address that didn’t belong to them to a marketing database. It may have been a hard to read scribble that was misread when the data was scanned (or typed) into the database. It could be that the person didn’t actually know their email address. There are a lot of ways spamtraps can end up on lists that don’t involve malice on the part of the sender.
But I can’t help thinking that mailing an address for 10 years, where the person has never ever responded might be a sign that the address isn’t valid. Or that the recipient might not want what you’re selling or, is not actually a potential customer.
I wrote a few weeks back about the difference between delivery and marketing. That has sparked conversations, including one where I discovered there are a lot of marketers out there that loathe and despise delivery people. But it’s delivery people who understand that not every email address is a potential purchaser. Our job is to make sure that mail to non-existent “customers” doesn’t stop mail from actually getting to actual potential customers.
Email doesn’t have an equivalent of “occupant” or “resident.” Email marketers need to pay attention to their data quality and hygiene. In the snail mail world, that isn’t true. My parents still get marketing mail addressed to me, and I’ve not lived in that house for 20+ years. Sure, it’s possible an 18 year old interested in virginia slims might move into that house at some point, and maybe that 20 years of marketing will pay off. It only costs a few cents to keep that address on their list and the potential return is there.
In email, though, sending mail to addresses that don’t have a real recipient there has the potential to hurt delivery to all other recipients on your list. Is one or two bad addresses going to be the difference between blocked and inbox? No, but the more abandoned addresses and non-existent recipients on a list there are on a list, the more likely filters will decide the mail isn’t really important or wanted.
The cost of keeping that address, one that will never, ever convert on a list may mean losing access to the inbox of actual, real, converting customers.
 

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April: The month in email

April was a big month of changes in the email world, and here at Word to the Wise as we launched our new site, blog and logo.
DMARC
The big story this month has been DMARC, which started with a policy change Yahoo made on April 4 updating their DMARC policy from “report” to “reject”. We began our coverage with a brief DMARC primer to explain the basics around these policy statements and why senders are moving in this direction. We shared some example bounces due to Yahoo’s p=reject, and talked about how to fix discussion lists to work with the new Yahoo policy. We gathered some pointers to other articles worth reading on the Yahoo DMARC situation, and suggested some options for dealing with DMARC for mail intermediaries. Yahoo issued a statement about this on April 11th, explaining that it had been highly effective in reducing spoofed email. We also noted a great writeup on the situation from Christine at ReturnPath. On April 22nd, AOL also announced a DMARC p=reject record.  We talked a bit about who might be next (Gmail?) and discussed how Comcast chose to implement DMARC policies, using p=reject not for user email, but only for the domains they use to communicate directly with customers. We expect to see more discussion and policy changes over the next few weeks, so stay tuned.
Spamtraps
We wrote three posts in our continuing discussion about spamtraps. The first was in response to a webinar from the DMA and EEC, where we talked about how different kinds of traps are used in different ways, and, again, how spamtraps are just a symptom of a larger problem. Following that, we wrote more about some ongoing debate on traps as we continued to point out that each trap represents a lost opportunity for marketers to connect with customers, which is really where we hope email program managers will focus. And finally, we tried to put some myths about typo traps to rest. As I mentioned in that last post, I feel like I’m repeating myself over and over again, but I want to make sure that people get good information about how these tools are used and misused.
Security
We started the month by saying “Security has to become a bigger priority for companies” and indeed, the internet continued to see security breaches in April, including the very serious Heartbleed vulnerability in SSL. In the email world, AOL experienced a compromise, which contributed to some of the DMARC policy changes we discussed above. In a followup post, we talked about how these breaches appear to be escalating. Again, we expect to hear more about this in the next weeks and months.
Best Practices
Ending on a positive note, we had a few posts about best practices and some email basics. We started with a pointer to Al Iverson’s post on masking whois info and why not to do it. Steve wrote up a comprehensive post with everything you ever wanted to know about the From header and RFC5322. I talked about how companies ignore opt-outs, and why they shouldn’t. I shared a really good example of a third-party email message, and also talked about message volume. And finally, we talked about how and why we warm up IP addresses.
Let us know if there’s anything you’d like to hear more about in May!

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