Many blocklists use spamtraps to detect poor sending practices and will cite spamtrap hits as the reason for the blocks. Senders legitimately fear spamtraps showing up on their lists because of this. If spamtraps weren’t used by blocklists no one would really care about them. They’re just another kind of bad address. Yesterday I answered a question about whether or not spamtraps...
One of the folks on the Email Geeks slack asked me a question last week that I thought was really insightful and has a somewhat nuanced answer. Do spamtraps really exist? Like, in the sense of being a real mailbox? They actually exist just like any other mailbox, yes? Otherwise they can’t be monitored and reported on. This includes typo spamtraps, correct? Do spamtraps exist? A spam trap...
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. 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...
One of the fascinating parts of my job is seeing how different groups in email have radically disparate points of view. A current example is how much value senders put on spamtraps compared to ISPs and filtering companies. I understand why this is. In all too many cases, when a sender asks why they’re mail is going to bulk or being blocked, the answer is “you’re hitting...
I really dislike whomever it was that coined the term pristine spamtraps. I get what they were trying to do, explain the different kinds of spamtraps and how different traps get on your list in different ways. Except… any type of trap can end up on your list in any way. For instance, not every recycled trap shows up on a list because bounce handling is bad. Sometimes, people input their old...
Spamtraps strike fear into the heart of senders. They’ve turned into this monster metric that can make or break a marketing program. They’ve become a measure and a goal and I think some senders put way too much emphasis on spamtraps instead of worrying about their overall data accuracy. Recently I got a question from a client about the chances that any address they were currently...
A few hours ago I was reading an ESP blog post that recommended removing addresses after they were inactive for a year because the address could turn into a spamtrap. That is not how addresses turn into spamtraps and not why we want to remove active addresses. Moreover, it demonstrates a deep misunderstanding of spamtraps. Unfortunately, there are a lot of myths and misunderstandings of...
From the archives: Mailing old addresses: 5 questions to ask first James asked the question on twitter: If you haven’t mailed an address in 5-10 yrs, would you include it in a re-engagement mail? A number of people responded that addresses that old should not be mailed. I think the answer is more complex than can be handled in 140 characters. Five to ten years is a very long time. Think about...
Happy March! As always, I blogged about best practices with subscriptions, and shared a great example of subscription transparency that I received from The Guardian. I also wrote about what happens to the small pool of people who fail to complete a confirmed opt-in (or double opt-in) subscription process. While there are many reasons that someone might not complete that process, ultimately that...
For a long time it was a known fact that certain ISPs recycled abandoned addresses into spamtraps. There were long discussions by senders about this process and how it happened. Then at a conference a few years ago representatives of ISPs got up and announced that they do not recycle addresses. This led to quite a bit of consternation about how deliverability folks were making things up and were...
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