One way to keep spam traps off your list
May 19 2006
Great article by George Bilbrey, VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions at ReturnPath.
Having spam traps on your email list causes a world of problems: listings on commonly used blacklists and blocks at top ISPs. For the uninitiated, a spam trap is usually an address that was created new and never signed up to receive any mailings. Therefore, by definition, all mail going to that account is unsolicited. This is a great tool to catch spammers who will often mail to addresses that they have harvested from web sites and newsgroups where the good folks who run the spam trap network have published their spam trap email addresses.
So how do legitimate marketers get spam traps on their lists? In our experience, there are three primary ways: (1) Bad luck - when entering an email address in a signup form, the user makes a typo and suddenly you’re a proud owner of a spam trap address; (2) Bad partners - one of your data partners (co-registration, etc.) sent you some spam traps; (3) Bad actors - someone harvested a lot of addresses and bulk added them to your list. There are other ways, but this is what we see most frequently.
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