What is a Spam Trap? Follow

A spam trap is essentially an email that doesn’t belong to a real person. They belong to ISPs (internet service providers) or anti-spam organizations to find people who buy lists or don’t have good list management practices. You do not want any of these on your CINC contact lists and we take a zero-tolerance stance towards spam traps.

How did I get them?

When you do not manage your list or buy a list you can and will get spam traps.

Quite often a spam trap is recycled from an inactive email address, which is already on your list. It could have been a person at one point in time, but because they no longer use that email, the ISP has recycled it to be a spam trap. Because spam traps can come from a previously used email address, new ones are being created all the time.

Spam traps do appear in publicly available data, which is used by people who sell lists online. Or a lead could have misspelled their domain name (gmial.com, etc.) which is a typo spam trap.

Why is this bad?

An ISP or anti-spam organization does not provide addresses they use or give advance warning when there’s a spam trap issue. The typical first step is to block our sending IPs, which is a big problem. If our sending IPs are blocked it affects all CINC users, and that’s why we take a zero-tolerance policy towards spam traps.

We monitor, on a daily basis, the number of spam traps that are hit and who hit them. We can not provide the addresses that are spam traps as that is not provided by ISPs or anti-spam organizations.

How do I avoid them?

If you have an issue with hitting spam traps, we will notify you. To avoid having an issue with spam traps, it is best to not focus on which addresses are spam traps, but instead improve your list management process. If you safely grow and maintain your list then your deliverability will increase. This will also cause spam reports, bounces, and unsubscribes to reduce in number.

Proper sunsetting is an important piece to helping to avoid spam traps.

How to avoid spam traps

• Clean your list. Review what to do with Stale Mail.
• Safely Grow Contact List. Never buy a list. Never get leads from sources where they don’t clearly know who and what they’re signing up for.