In one of my previous blogs, I mentioned how old emails can eventually be turned into a \”spamtraps\” email addresses. To some this may be a foreign term, so I thought that this would be a good topic to discuss this week.

So what exactly is a spamtrap? Simply put, it is an email address designed only to receive spam. It is not meant to function as a regular email address, meaning that the owner of such an address will never use it to solicit email communications, and thus any email received by that spamtrap will be immediately be considered unsolicited.

There are a number of ways spamtraps work. In one scenario, just as a fur trapper will lay out traps for animals, owners of spamtrap addresses will publish these secret addresses in hidden locations on the Web. This enables mechanisms such as email harvesters or \”bots\” to find the email. No legitimate sender would ever be encouraged to send email to a spamtrap.

You might ask, \”if spamtraps are so secret and so hidden, how does one it end up in my contact list when I\’m a legitimate sender and don\’t harvest email addresses?\” The other way spamtraps are created is from old, abandoned email addresses that were valid at one time. Here\’s an example.

Back in 2002, I created a new email address at Yahoo which we\’ll say was jareniscool@yahoo.com. I used the address for awhile, but decided a year later to switch to a different email address. After abandoning my Yahoo account, Yahoo temporarily disabled my account after a certain amount of time. Eventually, Yahoo permanently deactivated the email address, thus resulting in a hard bounce if someone tried to email it. However, after about 18 months in this state, Yahoo again reactivated that account – not for me, but now as a spamtrap.

Yahoo and other ISPs use this tactic as a way to identify senders that use poor list hygiene practices. They will also sometimes use old, outdated domains as spamtrap domains. For example, back in 2001, AT&T Broadband subscribers were given the email domain attbi.com. AT&T eventually deprecated, or retired that domain, and today subscribers have email addresses that end in att.net. As AT&T no longer uses the domain attbi.com for legitimate communications, they could consider any email sent to that domain as unsolicited.

So, that is essentially how spamtraps are created and used. Hopefully an email \”moral\” can be gained from this information, or in other words:

• Remove old emails. If you have emails in your list that are over 2 years old, chances are you may also have spamtraps
• Track who is opening and reading your messages. If you are sending to a subscriber that hasn\’t opened or read an email in more than 6 months, most likely they are not interested in your message, and even worse, they could be a spamtrap.
• Be extremely careful when purchasing email lists – better yet, don\’t buy them at all. There is no way to verify (other than the word of the list owner) how old an email address is.

Thanks,

Jaren Angerbauer
Director of Deliverability
mobileStorm
Drink Responsibly, Drive Responsibly, Email Responsibly