How To Avoid Spam Traps?
Marketing specialists spend months developing a top-notch email marketing strategy. They create promotional materials, build an email list, check and recheck it many times. Can all of their effort be useless? It can be if they don’t avoid spam traps.
Low delivery rate doesn’t just hinder your marketing efforts, it may place your IP or domain on the blacklist, forcing you to rethink your approach altogether. How can you avoid spam traps and increase the chances of your emails reaching their destination?
What Is A Spam Trap?
Spam traps have been created to make sure the recipient doesn’t receive an illegitimate email. These traps are used by email providers and blacklists to find malicious senders. Even though this approach works great for some users, it can catch legitimate emails as well, causing serious problems for both the sender and the receiver.
A spam trap looks like a regular email address. However, it isn’t. It doesn’t belong to a person or a company. It’s created to identify spammers and users who aren’t practicing email list hygiene.
Even one spam trap email can ruin your reputation. If you fail to exercise spam trap removal, your messages are likely to end up in the spam folder or you may get your domain blacklisted.
If you check your email list for spam traps, you can avoid serious consequences while reaching as many targets as you plan.
How Did Spam Trap Emails Get on My List?
Spam trap emails can get on your list if you aren’t careful about your email list hygiene. Two most common types of spam traps are:
1. Pristine Spam Trap
A pristine spam trap is an email address that appears on public websites. A regular legitimate user can’t see it. However, spammers who use bad email collection methods, such as scraping the sites for anything that looks like an email, can get large spam trap lists and never know what they’ve found.
If you are using illegitimate ways to obtain email addresses by scraping web pages or buying email lists from questionable sources, you are likely to get several pristine spam traps on your list.
2. Recycled Spam Trap
A recycled spam trap is an email address which people used to have in the past but then stopped. Email provider can use such addresses to turn them into spam traps. When an email is sent to such an address, the provider responds with a hard bounce.
After getting a hard bounce, legitimate senders stop trying to send emails to this address. However, spammers can ignore this bounce and continue sending emails. After a certain time, the address stops sending a hard bounce. It turns into a spam trap and marks each sender as a spammer.
If you fail to notice hard bounces and keep up your email list hygiene by using email validators and spam trap checkers, you may fall into the trap.
How To Check If An Email Address Is A Spam Trap
If you are a responsible sender, you have to avoid spam traps at all costs. Of course, sometimes, you may fall into a trap accidentally. For example, you may send an email to an old address, which turned into a spam trap during the time you haven’t been using it. However, such occurrences are rare.
If you check your email list on a regular basis, you can easily avoid all types of spam traps. It’s important to make it a habit to use spam trap email cleaners to ensure the top quality of your email list.
Spam trap email checker and email validator software are readily available for the use of all companies.
Make sure to take the following steps to avoid mistakes:
- Never purchase email lists – email lists for sale are very rarely validated so they are highly likely to contain spam traps
- Validate each new email address – use real-time email validators when possible to avoid putting spam traps on your list.
- Deactivate addresses that come with hard bounces – these addresses can turn into spam traps.
- Remove inactive subscribers from the list or at least check their emails regularly – inactive subscribers may not be using their emails for a while so they are excellent candidates for spam traps. Meanwhile, do you really want to waste your time on inactive subscribers?
Avoiding spam traps is easy if you take good care of your email list hygiene. Even though some respectable senders can fall into a spam trap occasionally, the majority of them never encounters such problems.
