What about Tom?

I use tom@hotmail.com as my default bogus email address. Tom has subscribed to so many things because of me.

This is why address verification doesn’t work. The address tom@hotmail.com is a real address. It exists. It accepts mail. And at least one person admits to signing up Tom for mail that the person doesn’t want. I’m sure he’s not the only one.

<- 250 OK
-> MAIL FROM:<test@gmail.com>
<- 250 test@gmail.com....Sender OK
-> RCPT TO:<tom@hotmail.com>
<- 250 tom@hotmail.com
-> QUIT
<- 221 SNT004-MC1F46.hotmail.com Service closing transmission channel

Signups like this do contribute to deliverability problems in a number of ways.

  1. The address tom@hotmail.com may be a spam trap. Sending mail to too many spamtraps can result in mail going to the bulk folder.
  2. It may belong to an actual person. Sending mail to someone who has not asked for it can result in spam complaints and bulk foldering.
  3. It may be a canary address. This is one that gets a lot of spam. If mail goes to this address then it’s likely spam and similar mail is bulk foldered at other recipients.
  4. This may be a test address. It might be used by someone inside Hotmail as a test address.

A few of these fake signups aren’t going to hurt deliverability for most senders. Over time, however, these fake signups are going to accumulate on a list. As they accumulate they can, and do, start to affect deliverability. It you’re hitting a lot of these types of addresses it tells the ISP that you don’t have good subscription practices. The ISP knows you are sending mail to people who don’t want it and never asked for it. Filters are designed to affect mail sent to people who don’t want it and never asked for it.
These kinds of addresses are one reason delivery folks talk about segmenting mail based on engagement. Getting rid of even a few of them off a list can improve deliverability for an otherwise opt-in list.
Address verification doesn’t weed out these address. The test I did above is exactly what most of the verification services do. They’re going to return that tom@hotmail.com is a valid address and it’s going to end up in your list.
For those of you who are the type to put real addresses into signup forms, please don’t. It’s unfair to the people who own those addresses and it’s unfair to marketers. Use an address that you know doesn’t exist – like anything@example.com, .net or .org. These domains are reserved by ICANN and will never have users. Stop directing your unwanted email to an innocent 3rd party. They don’t deserve it, and neither do the senders you’re trying to avoid.

Alternate contact when mail bounces
iCloud Service Disruption

Related Posts

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.
 

Read More

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.

Read More

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

Read More