What are Spam Traps and How to Deal With Them?

Spam traps are created to trap spammers. However, businesses also get trapped in this!

There are two types of email addresses, valid and invalid.

There are different types of invalid email addresses. This includes disposable, role-based, Spam-trap, graylisted, catch-all, and typo email addresses. It is usually hard to recognize all these email addresses through a single system. One such email address is the Spam-trap email address; which is very difficult to identify.

Spam-trap email addresses are created by anti-spam organizations and ISPs to identify and catch spammers. Which prevents unwanted emails and spam emails from reaching your inbox. So, an example of a Spam-trap could be the following: [email protected] or [email protected]

Before proceeding, Let’s review the subjects that will be tackled in the blog post.

In this blog,

• What is a Spam-trap email address?
• What are the different types of spam trap email addresses?
• How does the process of using a Spam-trap email address work?
• How to Identify and Stay Away from Spam Traps?
• What are the main effects of sending emails to spam trap email addresses on email marketing campaigns?

What is a Spam-trap email address?

Internet service providers (ISPs) or Anti-spam organizations create spam trap email addresses. The main purpose of a Spam-trap is to identify spammers and catch spammers. These organizations identify and block spammers. This process can prevent spammers from reaching other people.

What are the different types of spam trap email addresses?

There are mainly 2 types of Spam-trap email addresses.

1) Pure Spam-trap Email Address:

ISPs and anti-spam organizations create these email addresses for the sole purpose of catching spammers and are not intended to be used by real individuals or businesses. They are not used for communication or sign-up purposes.

2) Recycled spam trap email address:

These email addresses may have been used by employees of the company in the past and become inactive upon ceasing to be used. ISPs or anti-spam organizations periodically convert such inactive email addresses into spam traps.

How does the process of using a Spam-trap email address work?

The process of using the spam trap email address works in certain steps which are as follows.

• Creating Spam-trap email addresses
• Make them publicly available.
• Spammers collect this email address.
• Spammer sends an email to that email address
• ISPs identify the spammers.
• ISPs block the spammers

Thus spam-trap email addresses complete the process of catching spammers.

How to Identify and Stay Away from Spam Traps:

Preventing businesses from falling into the spam trap is an important part of any email marketing campaign. There are certain ways, which are helpful to identify as well as avoid spam trap email addresses. Let’s have a look at them.

1. Using a proper email verification tool.

   • By using a proper email verification tool you can easily identify Spam-trap email addresses. So, You can also avoid Spam-trap email addresses identified by an email verification tool. You can easily increase the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns by removing the Spam-trap from your email list.

2. Avoid emailing certain types of email addresses.

   • Spam-trap email addresses can be used as some type of email address that can reduce the effectiveness of your email marketing.
     Like, Inactive email addresses, Role-based addresses, Invalid email addresses, and Disposable email addresses. You can avoid Spam-traps by identifying and ignoring these types of email addresses.

3. Avoid buying email lists.

   • Purchased email lists are more likely to contain Spam-trap email addresses as those email lists may have been collected through unauthorized means. So, instead of buying an email list, building an organic list is a good option.

4. Double-verify the email address while collecting it.

   • Keep double verifying when collecting email lists so you can ignore invalid email addresses. If you have two-step verification, you will not get any response from the invalid email address which will help you to avoid a Spam-trap. This is a great way to avoid Spam-traps.

5. Constantly update and verify the email list.

• • Periodically verify and maintain the email list. Periodically remove redundant and inactive email addresses from the email list. And be careful when adding new email addresses to the email list, which will help you avoid Spam-trap email addresses.

Additionally, maintain the utilization of the most effective email marketing strategies to prevent falling into spam traps and ensure successful email marketing.

What are the main effects of sending emails to spam trap email addresses on email marketing campaigns?

1. 1. Reduces email deliverability.
   2. Bounce rate increases.
   3. The reputation of the domain decreases.
   4. Reduces ROI.

ISPs and anti-spam organizations create spam traps. It is considered violating or illegal when an individual or business makes it. Which creates a legal problem. Because of this, the domain can be panelized or blocked. The best way to avoid all this is to use email marketing best practices.
Spam is kept on many sites to avoid spammers but due to this businesses also lose many real customers. So it is not a healthy practice to use Spam-traps to avoid spammers in the initial period of the business. It is best to avoid using this at the beginning of a business.

Before wrapping up the blog, let’s briefly go over some statistics.

• • Nearly 85% of all emails are spam.
  • On average, that’s 21 spam emails per person per day!
  • The daily number of spam emails sent worldwide as of January 16th, 2023, by the USA is 8 billion.
  • 24.77% of spam was sent from Russia with another 14.12% from Germany in the year 2021
  • In 2021, it was estimated that nearly 319.6 billion emails were sent and received daily. And in December 2021, 45.37% of the total emails were deemed spam emails

These figures demonstrate the significance of utilizing spam traps to steer clear of spamming activities. They also show the impact on businesses of sending an email to a spam trap.

In this blog, we understand a lot about the topic of spam traps email. Understand various aspects such as different types of spam traps, methods to detect and avoid them, and how they can affect email marketing campaigns.

Hope you find this blog useful.