[Complete Guide]

WHAT ARE SPAM TRAPS? AND, HOW TO AVOID THEM?

netcorecloud.com What are Spam Traps? And, How to Avoid Them?

Spam traps are everywhere, floating around the internet waiting for a small misstep or a set of bad behaviors ready to be triggered and make the email marketing even more difficult than it already is for you. With each passing day, spam traps are being used more prominently than ever to detect spammers. So it has become vital for the email marketers or any other organization sending emails in bulk, to know about the Spam Traps.

This article covers most of the prominently asked questions about email Spam Traps and some tips on how to deal with them.

Here is a list of set questions we will be going through:

 What are spam traps?  Who creates and maintains spam traps?  How many different kinds of email spam traps are there?  How would spam traps affect me?  How to identify spam traps?  How does a spam trap end up in my email list?  Being a valid email sender am I vulnerable to spam traps?  Is there an online list of spam trap emails?  How do I prevent myself from falling into spam traps?-

What are Spam Traps? And, How to Avoid Them? What are Spam Traps?

A Spamtrap is usually a bot email address, also known as email honeypot used to collect spam. These email addresses are not meant for regular communication but are instead used to catch hold of spammers.

Spam trap email addresses are never directly visible or published on any website to ensure that legitimate users and email senders never get into this trap.

It's the spammers who typically use web crawlers to harvest email addresses from different websites and sell to other companies to make money. Most of the web crawlers are never able to distinguish between genuine, and these hidden spam traps. And, they end up storing all the email addresses in their email list and sell as leads in the market.

Marketers tend to procure these email lists to send cold emails. Once their emails hit these spam traps, the game is over. The sender of the email will be immediately flagged as a spammer and added as a blacklist in most of the global DNSBLs, and this will get further circulated within the anti-spam community.

Spam Trap is a potent mechanism in the arsenal of email services to curb spam emails. However, like every other so not 100% fail-proof, sometimes legitimate senders also get into this trap and end up getting their domain and IP address getting listed on the DNSBLs blacklist. If that happens, then there are ways to get yourself out of the email blacklists too.

What are Spam Traps? And, How to Avoid Them? As per securely, last year anti-phishing systems were triggered 467,188,119 times, recording a 56.51% of the traffic as spam, which is 4.03 p.p. more than 2018. Last year China become the largest spam contributor by generating around 21.26% of spam traffic.

Further, as per the study, 44% of spam emails were less than 2 KB in size, making it easy to download and access low bandwidth networks too while these spam emails consist of different categories of emails like cold emails, promotions, and even phishing. A serious concern that 17% of the users have experienced phishing in these spam emails.

What are Spam Traps? And, How to Avoid Them? Here is a graph which displays the number of email spam listed in the CIBL repository of spam emails:

Who Creates and Maintains Spam Traps?

Spam traps are owned and These DNSBLs are highly active at maintained by the DNSBLs, places like public forums and blogs anti-spam agencies, and Internet where most of the spammers try to Service Providers (ISPs). scrap email addresses. Most DNSBLs have their own framework and The DNSBL: The domain blacklisting partner network to generate and services own 92 % of the spam place these traps across the internet. traps and distribute the same in different hidden locations across The ISP: All major email ISPs, such the web to catch and hold the as Gmail, Yahoo, or AOL, do potential spammers. maintain their own set of spam trap

What are Spam Traps? And, How to Avoid Them? email addresses. Hitting this category of spam traps is even worse than hitting some of the DNSBLs because this could permanently blacklist your sending domain and IP address. Getting delisted in almost impossible and at the same time, your email deliverability will be severely affected.

How many different kinds of email spam traps are there?

Based on the type of different sender activity, there are four types of email spam traps created and distributed across the internet:

Classic Spam traps: These are also for scraping the email addresses called pristine spam traps. Classic from the websites to generate their Spam traps are the inactive email email lists. Not all web scrappers addresses, which can never be are smart, as the trap owners are. owned by a real human. These are In this cat mouse game, the web an inactive address, so there is no scrapper ends up scrapping these question of it being a part of any of seeded email trap addresses from the subscription list. Thus, anyone different websites, and the lead gen sending emails to this address will companies end up selling this be considered a spammer and will harvested list to its client. immediately get marked as blacklisted in the associated DNSBL. If you bought such a list and even sent one email to a seeded email Seeded Spam Traps: These are the trap address, then you will be email addresses purposely kept immediately get flagged as a hidden in various online resources spammer. Once flagged, your such as a website source code. mailing IP address and the domain Most email list providers use bots will get added on the DNSBL list.

What are Spam Traps? And, How to Avoid Them? Typo domain-based spam traps: As the name suggests, these traps identify the typo domains such as yaahoo.com instead of yahoo.com. These lists are not classic spam traps but will affect your sending reputation and might flag you as spam. These will degrade your sending domain reputation if kept unchecked.

Recycled email address based spam traps: These are the email addresses that were abandoned by the users a long time ago. Hitting these abandoned mail will cause a hard bounce for the sent email.

If there are multiple hard bounce requests recorded on the same address for a long time, then these email accounts are converted to spam traps by the DNSBL services. Hitting these traps gives ISP a perception that you are not maintaining a clean email list and that might increase the chance of you landing in the spam. ~ Laura, Wordtothewise

How many different kinds of email spam traps are there? How the spam traps would affect you depends solely on the type of email traps you are sending emails to. Here are a few ways that you might get impacted:

 If you end up hitting a classic spam trap, then there is a high probability of you getting blacklisted in the DNSBL databases.

 Your sender's reputation might get damaged if you are sending it to a recycled trap for a long time. This, in turn, will make many other mailbox providers bounce your email, causing more damage in the long run.

 You can be blacklisted by the large email ISPs such as Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL.

 Overall, there might be a huge loss in email deliverability due to a large number of hard bounces, blacklisting, and spam flags

What are Spam Traps? And, How to Avoid Them? How to identify spam traps?

It is really hard to determine spam traps since they look just like a valid email address that you can safely send emails to.

One of the ways you can try to identify spam traps can be by user engagement since they are not real users so they won't click, open, or react to any emails sent to them. If you are finding some email addresses being dormant in the response and are not active for a long time. Either way, they are not interested, or they are traps, remove them immediately.

What are Spam Traps? And, How to Avoid Them? Here are some email patterns you can verify to possibly detect some of the email addresses that might be spam traps in your list:

 Fake emails: Emails that are not dormant for a long time and some of even a valid email address, for example, these emails are used by DNSBL [email protected]. For owners to trap people sending to these an email list provider, it is just too emails which clearly states they are easy to automatically create an spamming. You can identify them by email address like this. They generally tracking the email engagement of the use a script to populate excel files sent emails. with fake email addresses.  Hard bounces: If you have sent  Email typos: For example instead an email to the recycled spam trap of [email protected] your list contains email you will get a hard bounce a typo version [email protected]. notification at your sending email address. You can use this to quickly  Dormant email addresses: There identify and remove the email id to are some email addresses that are no prevent your domain reputation. longer used by anyone and are

How does a spam trap end up in my email list?

A spam trap might end up in your email list if you are not following proper email guidelines to populate your email list such as Purchasing an email list from online sources, Not tracking and emoving Unengaged / Bounced / Unsubscribed emails, Not adding users through subscription or any other opt-in method. It all comes to maintaining good email list hygiene.

What are Spam Traps? And, How to Avoid Them? Being a valid Email Sender am I vulnerable to spam traps?

Yes, you are! Let me tell you, it might not be even your fault that the spam traps are in your emails. You might already have some of the spam traps right now in your email list. Here are some reasons that might be the cause of it.

 The recipient has made a typo engagement and remove the of while submitting the email unsubscribed emails from the list. address in the subscription form.  Closed Email accounts. Not your This is a common reason and can fault but one of the reasons. take you by surprise. So please  confirm each email address before Resending emails to the old sending an email to it. email lists that are no longer active. This mostly happens when  Subscriber is no longer an organization tries to increase interested. This is a little bit its reach while sending and off-putting but a realistic scenario. reattaching the emails from their Again please check the customer email list archive.

Just don't slack off with maintaining clean emails in the email list. There are so many kinds of email traps that may land in your email list in so many ways. Even if you are a genuine sender, it's really hard not to be impacted.

Last but not the least please use a double opt verification method for each of your email subscribers. This might lead to a slow rate of subscriber buildup but is far better than being into several blacklists and losing your domain credibility.

What are Spam Traps? And, How to Avoid Them? Is there an online list of spam trap emails?

No, it simply doesn't work this way. There is no service that can provide you the list of spam trap email addresses. If they are claiming to be, then get away from them, it's mostly a cash grab.

The core functioning of the spam traps depends mainly on the spammers who are sending emails to the spam traps thinking they are real users. If everyone or anyone knows this list, then this won't work and would be a huge loss, so the list is always secretive.

How do I prevent myself from falling into spam traps?

By being vigilant of what kind of emails you are adding into your email list and by making sure every user added to the list is opted in to receive the emails. Please check the following checklist to ensure the emails you are sending are not a honey pot trap.

What are Spam Traps? And, How to Avoid Them?  Avoid buying email lists from  Always run a quick validation any site. Instead, increase your on the email address before email list gradually by online adding it to the email list. opt-in forms/subscriptions or by  Make sure to remove emails extensive researching. that are dormant and are not  You can also try certain services showing any activity for a long that try to validate your emails time. This can be done through before adding it into your email list performance tracking. or you can use certain email  Use double opt-in user campaign solutions to do that for confirmation before adding a you. Mailtrain, a bulk mail solution, subscriber by sending a provides checking for every email confirmation link to the user email address being uploaded to the id, since you don't know if they are email list to be verified first, else it real active users or not will reject the email to be added  into the blacklist. Remove bounced emails. This is good for your deliverability and  Make a process to regularly check your email sending domain email engagement rates like open and reputation. click counts to identify the invalid emails.

Conclusion

Spam traps will get you by surprise if you let them. A rule of thumb for avoiding many problems regarding these in the future is you should be prepared for it as much as you can, especially if you have been sending emails for a very long time. I hope that this tutorial will help you find the vulnerabilities in your emailing habits and avoid the spam traps.

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