Purging to prevent spamtraps

Someone recently asked when they should purge addresses to remove spamtraps. To my mind this is actually the wrong question. Purging addresses that don’t engage is rarely about spamtraps, it’s about your overall communication processes.

Outline of a head with a gear inside it.

Well maintained traps will actively bounce mail for 6 – 12 months before turning the address into a trap. In those cases it’s mostly the whole domain being turned into a trap, not just a single address. The common case where folks start hitting the recycled traps is that they have, for some reason, not regularly sent email to an address.

My general rule is if you’re actively bounce handling your mailings and you’re not avoiding mailing for more than a year then you shouldn’t have to worry about addresses turning into traps.

But you don’t just want to worry about spamtraps. You also want to be concerned about your overall reputation. For instance, an email address that never opens might have been abandoned by its owner (they forgot the password, moved to another account, whatever) and their failure to log into the address and your continuing to send mail to it turns it into a signal for the machine learning filters.

Alternatively, an email address that isn’t opening mail may never see the mail because it’s being delivered to spam and they don’t care enough to correct that. Every email delivered to the spam folder hurts your reputation, it’s less of a negative than if the user put the message there, but it still affects your reputation. Removing addresses that don’t engage removes negative hits to your reputation.

In both of those cases I tend to go reasonably long periods of time 12 – 24 months. But, there are arguments for longer or shorter, depending on your specific business model.

There are many good reasons to stop emailing addresses that don’t engage. Few of those reasons are specific to spamtraps.

Microsoft and SmartScreen
Mentally modelling filters

Related Posts

Size isn't the only metric

MarketingSherpa has a case study up today about a company that took an aggressive stance on re-engagement that reduced their house list size by over 95%. While the size of the list went down, online sales doubled.
The whole article is a lesson in how to do email right. They are sending relevant and engaging mail to their subscribers. They kept the addresses of people who wanted the mail, but designed a new program from the ground up. All of the key points I, and others, keep talking about is present in their new program.

Read More

Raising the standard

Last week news broke that Mailchimp had disconnected a number of anti-vaccination activists from their platform and banned anti-vax content. I applaud their decision and hope other companies will follow their lead in banning harmful content from their network.

Read More

Spamtraps are not the problem

Often clients come to me looking for help “removing spamtraps from their list.” They approach me because they’ve found my blog posts, or because they’ve been recommended by their ISP or ESP or because they found my name on Spamhaus’ website. Generally, their first question is: can you tell us the spamtrap addresses on our lists so we can remove them?
My answer is always the same. I cannot provide a list of spamtrap addresses or tell you what addresses to remove. Instead what I do is help clients work through their email address lists to identify addresses that do not and will not respond to offers. I also will help them identify how those bad addresses were added to the list in the first place.
Spamtraps on a list are not the problem, they’re simply a symptom of the underlying data hygiene problems. Spamtraps are a sign that somehow addresses are getting onto a list without the permission of the address owner. Removing the spamtrap addresses without addressing the underlying flaws in data handling may mean resolving immediate delivery issues, but won’t prevent future problems.
Improving data hygiene, particularly for senders who are having blocking problems due to spam traps, fixes a lot of the delivery issues. Sure, cleaning out the traps removes the immediate blocking issue, but it does nothing to address any other addresses on the list that were added without permission. In fact, many of my clients have discovered an overall improvement in delivery after addressing the underlying issues resulting in spamtraps on their lists.
Focusing on removing spamtraps, rather than looking at improving the overall integrity of data, misses the signal that spamtraps are sending.

Read More