It's not about the spamtraps

I’ve talked about spamtraps in the past but they keep coming up in so many different discussions I have with people about delivery that I feel the need to write another blog post about them.
Spamtraps are …
… addresses that did not or could not sign up to receive mail from a sender.
… often mistakenly entered into signup forms (typos or people who don’t know their email addresses).
… often found on older lists.
… sometimes scraped off websites and sold by list brokers.
… sometimes caused by terrible bounce management.
… only a symptom …

… of a bigger problem with address collection.

Removing spamtraps …
… just means you’ve removed the spamtraps you know about.
… may mean you have a spamtrap free list …

… until you start adding new addresses to it.

… does not fix mail going to addresses belonging to other people.
… does not guarantee good delivery.
… ignores the underlying issues.
Why do people take spamtraps so seriously?
A lot of this is historical and some of it is to avoid arguments. Just about any sender, when told they’re sending mail to someone who didn’t ask for it will respond “But we only send opt-in mail! That person is wrong! They signed up!!” I’ve had this happen to me more times than I can count.
I’ve even had clients come to me in the past where I’ve been able to dig into my own mailbox to affiliate spam. This is always a fun conversation.
spammailboxMe: Here are a dozen examples of the mail your affiliates sent to me in the last month.
Client: All our affiliates send opt-in mail. They’ve assured us of this.
Me: This is an email address only ever published on a website / not used since 2001 to sign up for anything / untagged so it’s not something I would have given them.
Client: Our vendors say you’re wrong. Would you like to hop on a call with them so they can tell you when you opted in?
The calls have happened and vendors have argued with me about whether or not I opted in to receive stuff from them. It tends to end up them claiming I opted in to mail and me telling them I did not. Sometimes they tell me I just forgot – except all my actual opt ins are tagged addresses and have been since roughly 1999, so if you’re not mailing a tagged address, I never gave it to you. Sometimes they tell me I opted in to some company they purchased back in the late 90s and therefore they had permission to send to me.
The discussions are never productive. They are so fixated on their business story, that they will duck and weave and tell me I’m wrong about the spam they are sending me.
This is why people focus on spamtraps!
With spamtraps there isn’t the discussion of whether or not someone signed up. There’s no account owner, no one who has this address and could have signed up. Even in the case of recycled traps, the addresses generally bounced for a while telling senders there was no account owner there. Focusing on spamtraps on a list deflects the back and forth argument about whether or not the sender has permission to send mail they’re sending.
But spamtraps aren’t the problem!
In fact, I was just talking to one of the Spamhaus volunteers who told me “I hate the modern day focus on traps.” I agree. We focus on traps because it deflects and diffuses a lot of the arguments about whether or not someone opted in. But that means we don’t address a lot of real issues, either. If there are spamtraps on a list, then that list has problems. Focusing on removing the traps doesn’t resolve the problems, it just focuses on the traps. That tends to lead to a cleanup strategy that doesn’t do what the sender thinks it does.
Spamtraps are the symptom!
If there are spamtraps on a list, then there are also addresses that go to a person who never opt-in on that same list. Focusing on fixing the problems that led to the spamtraps getting on the list then cleaning off addresses that aren’t performing leads to better overall delivery and fewer problems. Focusing on getting rid of spamtraps may, but may not, fix a SBL listing. Maybe. But it’s my experience that fixing a SBL listing may only resolve a small fraction of delivery problems. Getting off the SBL by trying to address spamtraps, will not fix bulk foldering or temp fails are major webmail providers.
Focusing on improving overall list hygiene and really making sure that mail is wanted and expected by the recipients generally will resolve both the SBL listing and fix the other delivery problems that are happening because of poor data and poor list hygiene.
I’ve written about spamtraps before. 

 

Related Posts

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!”

Read More

August 2015: The month in review

It’s been a busy blogging month and we’ve all written about challenges and best practices. I found myself advocating that any company that does email marketing really must have a well-defined delivery strategy. Email is such vital part of how most companies communicate with customers and potential customers, and the delivery landscape continues to increase in complexity (see my post on pattern matching for a more abstract look at how people tend to think about filters and getting to the inbox). Successful email marketers are proactive about delivery strategy and are able to respond quickly as issues arise. Stay tuned for more from us on this topic.
I also wrote up some deliverability advice for the DNC, which I think is valuable for anyone looking at how to maintain engagement with a list over time.  It’s also worth thinking about in the context of how to re-engage a list that may have been stagnant for a while. A comment on that post inspired a followup discussion about how delivery decisions get made, and whether an individual person in the process could impact something like an election through these delivery decisions. What do you think?
As we frequently point out, “best practices” in delivery evolve over time, and all too often, companies set up mail programs and never go back to check that things continue to run properly. We talked about how to check your tech, as well as what to monitor during and after a send. Josh wrote about utilizing all of your data across multiple mail streams, which is critical for understanding how you’re engaging with your recipients, as well as the importance of continuous testing to see what content and presentation strategies work best for those recipients.
Speaking of recipients, we wrote a bit about online identity and the implications of unverified email addresses in regards to the Ashley Madison hack and cautioned about false data and what might result from the release of that data.
Steve’s in-depth technical series for August was a two-part look at TXT records — what they are and how to use them — and he explains that the ways people use these, properly and improperly, can have a real impact on your sends.
In spam news, the self-proclaimed Spam King Sanford Wallace is still spamming, despite numerous judgments against him and his most recent guilty plea this month. For anyone else still confused about spam, the FTC answered some questions on the topic. It’s a good intro or refresher to share with colleagues. We also wrote about the impact of botnets on the inbox (TL;DR version: not much. The bulk of the problem for end users continues to be people making poor marketing decisions.) In other fraud news, we wrote about a significant spearphishing case and how DMARC may or may not help companies protect themselves.

Read More

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.

Read More