Author: Ethan Theo

Business owners and marketers abhor sending law-abiding emails only to have an ISP or spam watch group labeling that email as spam.

The FCC created and the government passed the CAN-SPAM Act to govern how business can send commercial emails. Because the small percentage of email marketers who could care less about the spam laws have made sending legitimate businesses emails a hassle at best, ISPs, email providers, and the FCC use different methods to catch spammers in the act. This includes using spam traps.

Unfortunately, a number of legitimate emails get caught in these traps as well, which can results in the sender unknowingly being labeled a spammer. Oftentimes, this label results in legitimate domains, email addresses and IP addresses being blacklisted.

The best way to avoid problems is to understand how spam traps work, and how to detect and remove them. Because spam traps and other email marketing issues are such a problem, a number of methods are available to help prevent spam traps from infiltrating your email list in the first place, and detect those that do.

How Do Spam Traps Get on an Email List?

Spam trap email addresses infiltrate email lists a number of ways, but usually when a bot:

·  Fills out a contact from

·  Signs up for a newsletter

·  Signs up for an email subscription

Buying email lists is another way spam traps get onto email lists, especially if you do not know the origin of the email addresses. For this reason alone, it is always better to capture your own addresses and create your own high quality email subscriber list. It takes longer to do so than purchasing a list does, but safety of knowing who your subscribers are is well worth the tradeoff.

How do Spam Traps Work?

Two types of spam traps exist: pristine traps and recycled traps. The type of trap that infiltrates your list can make a big difference in the outcome should you unknowingly send an email to it.

Pristine spam traps: ISPs and blacklists create these email addresses with the intention of catching spammers who use bots and scrapers red handed. They do this by creating a new email address, and then adding the newly created address to difficult to get to places, such as within source code, or in other places that humans would not come across it. The scraper then adds the trap to the email list, which then receives email, thus catching the sender in the trap.

Recycled spam traps: ISPs and blacklists take over email addresses that previous owners abandoned, or the ISP revoked for whatever reason. After taking over the email addresses, the ISPs watch the received email to see who continues to send without having received a response.

The consequences of sending email to a pristine spam trap are harsh, and usually result in ISPs permanently blacklisting your domain. This is because those who send to pristine traps usually harvested the email using blackhat means, and do not intend to abide by the Can SPAM act.

Consequences of sending email to a recycled trap are different, and usually result in a lowered reputation because ISPs can see that you don’t monitor your list. Email marketers get caught in this trap more often, and it is easier to repair your reputation as well.

How to Spot Spam Trap Addresses?

Removing bot-run email addresses is a task that can be automated using a Service Objects email address validation API. The API works by retrieving and appending information to each email capture before the capture is assigned to your list. You can then use the extra information to determine if the email address captured is from an actual person or if it is likely spam or a spam trap.

Those who only use legitimate means of capturing email addresses should attempt to detect and remove recycled email addresses as soon as possible. You can prevent spam traps by:

·  Automatically reject email addresses that are obviously malformed (missing the “.com” for example) because these can be spam traps

·  Confirm sign ups with opt in emails and welcome emails to ensure person wants to subscribe and that email is valid – spam traps can’t do this, and you can remove emails that bounce

·  Use captchas to help reject spam, and stop bots

·  Remove addresses to which you never receive a response, or those from which you’ve received a response previously, but abruptly stopped

Otherwise, as long as you never buy lists or harvest emails using unsavory methods, you should not have to worry about sending email to or detecting a pristine spam trap too much. However, if you do, you’ll want to remove detect and remove pristine traps immediately.

Article contributed by Jenna Smith/em>