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...
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...
Many years ago I was working at the UW-Madison. Madison is a great town, I loved it a lot. One of the good bits was this local satire paper called The Onion. This paper would show up around campus on Wednesdays. Our lab, like many university employees and students, looked forward to Wednesday and the new humor The Onion would bring to us. At the same time, I was internet friends with an employee...
One of the comments on my Spamtraps post claims that audit trails should be maintained by recipients, not senders. If people are using legitimate email addresses that legitimately opted in and verified details, they should be required to have a log of which lists they opted in to. You are just asking to hurt legit mailers. The underlying reasoning appears to be that no sender ever spams, and...
I believe that spamtraps – for the professional marketer – are scare tactics that are no longer relevant. a professional marketer I’ve talked about spamtraps in the past. I’ve described a number of different types of spamtraps and what they tell the trap maintainer about a sender’s practices. One thing I think the professional marketer above is missing is that...
James from Cloudmark has his own insight on spamtraps.
We focused Monday on Trend/MAPS blocking fully confirmed opt-in (COI) mail, because that is the Gold Standard for opt-in. It is also Trend/MAPS stated policy that all mail should be COI. There are some problems with this approach. The biggest is that Trend/MAPS is confirming some of the email they receive and then listing COI senders. The other problem is that typos happen by real people signing...
Over the last year or so we’ve been hearing some concerns about some of the blacklisting policies and decisions at Trend Micro / MAPS. One common thread is that the ESP customers being listed aren’t the sort of sender who you’d expect to be a significant source of abuse. Real companies, gathering addresses from signup forms on their website. Not spammers who buy lists, or who...
“I thought spamtraps were addresses harvested off webpages.” “I thought spamtraps were addresses that were valid and now aren’t.” “I thought spamtraps were addresses created to catch spammers.” There is a lot of “I thought…” about spamtraps. Most of the theories are accurate but limited. Like the blind men and the elephant, they catch...
There is a lot of mythology surrounding spamtraps, what they are, what they mean, how they’re used and how they get on lists. Spamtraps are very simply unused addresses that receive spam. They come from a number of places, but the most common spamtraps can be classified in a few ways. Addresses that used to belong to someone and subsequently abandoned. This is where a lot of spamtraps at...
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