What is a Spam Trap?

Something to avoid

A spam trap is an email address that's not used for regular communication. It can receive incoming messages but is not used to send email. 

The purpose of a spam trap is to find spammers or people who grow their email marketing lists by adding contacts without the users' permission (e.g. Shopify store visitors who did not submit an opt-in form). 

If you're a business owner who uses email marketing, please keep reading. Spam traps can harm legit marketers even if they don't engage in back hat tactics like buying lists or web scraping. 

This seems obvious, but it's worth repeating. Build your contact list with legit users who completed an opt-in form. Don't buy lists and add them to your tinyAlbert contacts.

Who creates spam traps?

Spam traps are created by internet service providers (ISPs), large companies (e.g. McAfee), and organizations that have an interest in cutting spam (e.g. Spamhaus).  All of these agencies are trying to do good, but sometimes honest email marketers get caught in their trap. A form of collateral damage, you might say.

How do spam traps get into your audience?

Let's say you don't buy lists or scrape the web for email addresses. It's still possible to have a spam trap in your tinyAlbert audience. Here's how.

Typo domain traps

A website visitor fills in the opt-in form but accidentally misspells their email address. It could be something like john@yahho.com (two h's instead of two o's). Some spam traps are intentionally created with these common typos in mind. By no fault of your own, a spam trap address ends up in your audience list.

Dead address traps

Long ago, someone filled in an opt-in form and joined your audience. But (for any number of reasons), that email address was dormant for quite a while (say 6 to 12 months). Then, one day, the address is repurposed by an anti-spam group and is now used as a spam trap. Ta-da, your list has a spam trap. 

What happens in the spam trap?

Let's say there's a spam trap in your tinyAlbert audience, and you send messages to that address. What happens?

Worst case scenario? Your email address, domain, or IP are blocklisted. For this to happen, you'd need to fall into a pristine spam trap: an email address that was made to find spammers. If you don't buy lists or scrape the web, there's almost no chance of that happening.

A blocklist, once known as email blacklisting, is a giant database of email addresses, domains, and IPs flagged as spammers. If you are on the blocklist, your emails are blocked, which means they're sent to the spam folder or deleted altogether. 

If you send messages to typo domain or dead address spam traps, the penalties tend to be less severe. You might see a decline in open rates and more messages reported as spam.

How to avoid spam traps?

tinyAlbert does a lot of that heavy lifting for you. When we flag a spammy email address or record a bounce, we automatically stop sending to those addresses.

I encourage everyone to use a list of hygiene best practices. That means reducing the number of sends to audience members who do not engage with your messages. Email your most engaged and recent clients often. Email older email addresses less frequently or perhaps not at all. Try to clean your list or segment every 90 days.

We can't remove email addresses from your Shopify audience, but there is a workaround if you want to clean that list. Read how to Clean Up Your Shopify Integration Audience List

That's it.

Now you know about spam traps and how to avoid them.