SPAMTRAPS PART 1: WHAT ARE THEY?
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Spamtraps are bad news. If you’ve ever had a deliverability issue with a large ISP, you’ve already run into them. ISPs and blacklists regularly use spamtrap data to determine which senders to block.
Spamtraps come in three varieties: Long dead email addresses at the top ISPs (that were once valid), email addresses that never existed and addresses that anti-spam advocates put on the internet for address harvesters to find.
AOL and other top ISPs recycle long-dead email addresses into spamtraps. Addresses are converted after mailing attempts bounce for a long period of time, usually eighteen months. That gives senders enough time to remove the address from their lists (because it always bounces), and anybody who continues to send to the address after that time is identified as having poor list hygiene.
Some blacklist operators utilize domains that receive lots of misdirected mail. Often their domain name is similar to a real domain name. They’ve noticed that they generate a lot of bounces when they try to mail to addresses that never existed and hypothesize that the attempted mail is spam. By extension, the sender attempting to deliver this mail is to be considered a spammer. Blacklist operators therefore will repurpose these domains so that all mail to them feeds into the input side of their blacklist.
The oldest, and now less common, type of spamtrap refers to email addresses that anti-spam advocates put out on the internet for address harvesters to find. This is how the first big spammer lists were compiled-- If your email address was on a website, a spammer’s “harvester” software found it by surfing the web, and added it to their spam list. Many internet users gave up old email addresses and started using new ones because dozens-to-hundreds of spammers added their address to lists without consent. Harvested email lists draw huge percentages of complaints; no reputable sender would utilize a list compiled in such a manner. Harvested lists are illegal, and they not allowed into the ExactTarget system under any circumstances.
On Wednesday, in part two, I’ll talk about how spamtraps can end up in your list, and how you can avoid them.
Spamtraps come in three varieties: Long dead email addresses at the top ISPs (that were once valid), email addresses that never existed and addresses that anti-spam advocates put on the internet for address harvesters to find.
AOL and other top ISPs recycle long-dead email addresses into spamtraps. Addresses are converted after mailing attempts bounce for a long period of time, usually eighteen months. That gives senders enough time to remove the address from their lists (because it always bounces), and anybody who continues to send to the address after that time is identified as having poor list hygiene.
Some blacklist operators utilize domains that receive lots of misdirected mail. Often their domain name is similar to a real domain name. They’ve noticed that they generate a lot of bounces when they try to mail to addresses that never existed and hypothesize that the attempted mail is spam. By extension, the sender attempting to deliver this mail is to be considered a spammer. Blacklist operators therefore will repurpose these domains so that all mail to them feeds into the input side of their blacklist.
The oldest, and now less common, type of spamtrap refers to email addresses that anti-spam advocates put out on the internet for address harvesters to find. This is how the first big spammer lists were compiled-- If your email address was on a website, a spammer’s “harvester” software found it by surfing the web, and added it to their spam list. Many internet users gave up old email addresses and started using new ones because dozens-to-hundreds of spammers added their address to lists without consent. Harvested email lists draw huge percentages of complaints; no reputable sender would utilize a list compiled in such a manner. Harvested lists are illegal, and they not allowed into the ExactTarget system under any circumstances.
On Wednesday, in part two, I’ll talk about how spamtraps can end up in your list, and how you can avoid them.
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