Articles - Email Marketing - May 5, 2020

What is a Spam Trap?

admin May 5, 2020

0 422 4 min read

Spam traps and how you might email them can be a long conversation. The simplest way to describe them is they’re addresses functioning solely to catch bad senders being…well, bad.

Beyond that, while still keeping this simple, there are a few classifications of spam traps. They can be an email address on a sender’s list that has either not opted in to receive mail or an address old enough to have been reclaimed by a sensor network or the issuing mailbox provider (MBP), They can also be a domain submitted incorrectly upon sign up, one that cannot receive mail and was built to be scraped, or some combination thereof.

Spam traps are, above all else, a sign of a list hygiene issue.

As with much of deliverability, nothing is ever so simple and not all traps are a sign of poor practices. Much like blacklists, not all spam traps are created equally. You must first know what kinds of spam traps live in the email world and why before you can understand their impact.

Trap Types

At the highest level, spam traps can be broken into three categories: typo, recycled, and pristine. These can dive further into more specific categories, but for this article we’ll be covering these three.

Typo Traps

A typo trap is usually an incorrectly entered address upon sign up. This could be as simple as hitting too many o’s for @yahoo.com (newsubscriber@yahoooo.com) or missing the “m” in @gmail.com. Fun fact: Gail.com is one of the more popular misspelled domains. Sorry, Gail.

Typo trap addresses can be weeded out using email address verification at time of collection. You could implement a drop-down on the sign-up form with common domain options. When newsubscriber@yahoooo.com begins typing too many o’s, a “did you mean” drop-down would appear with options like yahoo.com, yahoo.co.uk, yahoo.co.jp, etc. This allows a user to correct the mistake before clicking submit. Some typo traps can be caught and removed through the use of a validation tool after the fact, and it’s not a bad idea for email marketers to have an in-house list of common typo domains to verify against before your first email to a new subscriber.

These addresses, in small doses, are natural to the email ecosystem and can also be removed through confirmed opt-in and engagement-based sunsetting strategies.