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...
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...
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...
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. What should...
People make all sorts of claims about typo traps. One claim that showed up recently was that Spamhaus has just started using typo traps. I asked my Facebook network when people started using typos to detect incoming spam. Two different colleagues mentioned using typos, both on the left hand side and the right hand side, back in ’98 and ’99. The point is, typo traps are absolutely...
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...
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...
I’m seeing an increase in the number of articles stating wildly wrong things about spam traps. Some have started claiming that typo traps are new. Or that typo traps are newly used by Spamhaus. These claims make for great copy, I guess. Wild claims about how the evil anti-commerce self-appointed internet police are actively trying to trap marketers get clicks. These claims also...
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...
Earlier this week some ESPs started asking if other ESPs have seen an uptick in Spamcop listings. The overwhelming answer (9 of 11 ESP representatives) said yes. I’ve also had clients start to ask me about Spamcop listings. All in all, there seems to be some changes at Spamcop that means more senders are showing up on the Spamcop radar. Luckily, Spamcop provides us some insight into their...
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