If you have hit any spam trap recently you may already know that the ramifications of hitting a spam trap are pretty serious and that will possibly answer the above questions but let us discuss it in details about why they matter so much and how they can get on your list.
Many companies using spamtraps will consist of DNS blocklists, major ISPs, various spam filter providers, and email reputation companies. The details of how they are used differ from company to company, sometimes even from spam trap to spam trap. Some companies assess the value of their spam traps on their past usage basis; some others look for strikes on several traps; and many use them only in an advisory potential along with other analytics.
Consequences for hitting them can varies severity, based on what kind you hit, the company operating it, and number of times you hit it. On the excessive side, an ISP or reputation organization will block the IP address (or whole pool of IP addresses) from which the emails are sending. This would impact a large part of 171 Mails customers, which is why we take complaints or notices about spam traps very seriously.
“But,” you might be asking, “can’t I just build my list and left out the spam traps? One spam trap in the list of 1 million emails is not so bad.
The company operating the spam traps does not know if you send to 1 person or 1 million people, and they do not care about it. They are more like symptom of a problem, an indication for improvement in list-collection methods. If you are hitting a spam trap, there happens to be good possibility you are also delivering email to actual individuals who did not opt-in. It’s possible abc.com is an actual company, or XYZ employs another David. Sending email to these people is spamming, and none of us wants to deliver spam, right?
That’s why the answer is not just detect and eliminating the spam trap from your list. First off, anti-spam companies make detection of the actual spamtrap with very difficult. The other important thing is to make sure the whole list is clean so those actual individuals will get a little less junk, which is something we can all appreciate.
Generally people asks about can’t they just have a public record available of all the spam trap email addresses created or converted by major ISPs, various spam filter providers, and email reputation companies? The answer is no there is no available public record of spamtrap email addresses, so if someone tells you that he can get a record of spamtrap email addresses or he clean out all the spam traps from your list know this he is bluffing and he will rip you off. So until and unless you use best practices to build your list and timely perform list hygiene process you will not be able to get your way out from spam traps. We will discuss various methods of list building and list hygiene in our future posts. Until next time……
