A Quick Guide to Spam Traps

Spam traps are the email address that is used by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as Yahoo, Google, Outlook, and many more to identify the senders who are not following email best practices. These email addresses may have been legitimate once but now they are invalid.

Let’s have a look at an example:

Suppose you got a job at a new organization, your old work email address would become invalid and go in the stale mode i.e not showing activity.

Any contact that hasn’t opened or clicked an email over the year can be a spam trap and it is advisable that you should remove these from your email list.

Types of Spam Traps

Pristine/Pure Traps:

Pure or Pristine traps are created by ISPs that are never been associated with any person. These emails are only meant to work as spam traps. Generally, these emails are embedded in the websites to identify the spammers. When spammers extract these emails from a website and add them to their list and start sending emails. This will trigger the traps affecting your sender’s reputation.

Recycled Traps:

These traps are the email address that was once legitimate but now they haven’t shown any activity for over a year. For Eg: The email address of info@example.com, Email address of previously associated employees.

Typo Traps:

These are like recycled traps. These traps contain typing errors. For eg: @yaho instead of @yahoo, @gmai instead of @gmail.com.

What happens if you hit spam trap?

• Damage in domain sender reputation
• Damage in sending IP address
• Increase in bounce rate
• If you hit thes traps operated by major ISPs such as yahoo or AOL they can permanently blacklist your sending domain

How to avoid spam traps

• Never buy a list
• Use email verification
• Include double opt-in
• Practice permission-based marketing

 Conclusion

Spam traps are there to catch spammers. If you are concerned about these traps know the best practices to avoid them. Hope this article will help you.