What Is “Honeypots” and Why Use Spam Trap Removal Software?
What Is “Honeypots” and Why Use Spam Trap Removal Software?
Spam traps are used by blacklists and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to attract in spammers and block them. There are about tons of spam traps worldwide that can get into your database and harm your marketing campaigns. Therefore, spam trap removal software or services is a crucial tool that can help eliminate this fraud and other further detriments.
What is Spam Traps?
Commonly pertained to as “honeypots,” a spam trap appears as if it’s an actual email address and owned by a real person when actually it is not.
A spam trap is not owned by a real person and doesn’t bring any value to your marketing campaigns. Since spam trap addresses do not opt-in to obtain emails, any incoming messages will instantly flag and consider the sender as a spammer.
Spam traps can get into your database only if you are not practicing email hygiene and not complying with email marketing rules.
Blacklist providers and ISPs usually make use of spam traps to spot harmful senders. Yet even legit senders who don’t practice email hygiene or uses bad email build-up strategies can cause a warning, too.
How did a spam trap wind up on your mailing list?
To learn about how a spam trap can wind up on your mailing list, it is important to understand the different kinds of spam traps that are out there. Laura Atkins, email deliverability expert and owner of Word to the Wise, put together a comprehensive list of spam trap categories.
Here, we’ll focus on the most common type of spam traps:
Pristine traps
Type of traps that are posted on the across the web and is hidden from the usual users. Only those people who commonly practice poor email collection processes can find them, like scraping the internet for everything that appears like an email address. If you obtained addresses by scraping them from different websites– or bought a list, thus there is a big tendency that you may have gotten a pristine spam trap.
Recycled Traps
Type of email addresses that were made use of by actual people and then, later on, dumped it. These abandoned addresses, at some point, were converted into a trap by the ISPs.
When an email is not used anymore, ISPs will deactivate it after a certain time.
Domain Spam Traps
Most email marketers don’t speak too much about this, yet domain spam traps are likely risky.
In this instance, each email address for a particular domain can be a spam trap. Blacklist providers would brazenly ask owners of inactive domains to point their MX records to the blacklist service provider. When that happens, all email addresses of that domain turned into spam traps.
The only way to locate and eliminate spam traps is to a close examination at the quality of your mailing list. Most spam traps won’t display engagement, such as clicks and open rates. If you actively deal your non-active subscribers, you’ll eliminate spam traps, as well.
Managing a campaign which requests existing subscribers to reconfirm if they are still willing to receive your messages is another strategy to separate engaged subscribers from those who didn’t confirm, including spam traps.
Whether or not you succeeded in identifying the traps and eliminate them off from your list, you’ve only handled the indicator, not the cause. Be aware of how the spam traps got into your list in the first place and improve your list building procedure to avoid further spam traps.
Spam traps shows up both on your latest sign-ups or in your oldest inactive segments, so make sure you focus on both angles to keep them away from your list and use spam trap cleaning service.
