Email Spam Trap: What It Is and Why Should You Avoid It?
The email spam trap is a red alert for all email marketers. In 2022, around half of the total emails were identified as spam. It indicates that they need to improve their email list if they don’t want to be marked as spam by the Internet service provider (ISP) or their email service provider (ESP). But what causes their email spam and makes them fall into the email spam trap? Read more in this blog to find the answers.
What does it mean by spam trap?
Email spam traps are the detectives who aim to identify and catch spammers. With spammer, they mean the senders who are not following the email best practices. In this approach, internet service providers or third-party blocklists use email addresses, also called honeypots, to bait spammers.
Email spam aims to reduce spam traffic to a network to protect the ISP's reputation.
The types of spam traps are as follows:
1. Pristine spam trap: Such email addresses are not legitimate, which means they are not associated with a real person. These email addresses are the traps that the ISP creates to function as spam traps.
The email addresses are hidden within the site code. As a result, whenever a spammer scrapes the site to their mailing list, this hidden email address also reaches the spammer as a trap.
This technique helps in identifying marketers who practice poor list-building methods.
2. Recycled spam trap: Such email addresses are legitimate but for a short span. In simple words, these email addresses are the ones repurposed by the individual or ISP as spam trap addresses. This also includes the email addresses of employees who are no longer working there.
These emails may not be harmful for a while; however, repeatedly using them can cause an issue. Hence, such email addresses should be refined from time to time to prevent any challenges in email marketing.
For example,
3. Typo spam trap: Email addresses that have a typo, such as “gnail” instead of “gmail” or “tahoo” instead of "yahoo,” are also considered email spam traps. This type of spam trap is not as severe as pristine, and it’s normal to make such mistakes, yet it can cause your spamming problem.
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Why should we be aware of the email spam trap?
For a marketer, sending emails to any of these categories can cause a problem. It indicates that you are actively updating your email list or extracting email lists from illegitimate methods.
As a result, your ISP will know that the sender is involved in spamming activity, and this will negatively affect the sender’s reputation. Also, it can lead to filtering such emails in the receiver’s list as spam and throwing them to the spam folder or being blocked.
Here are other major challenges that you may face if you fall into the email spam trap.
Reputation Damage
The Internet service provider or your email service provider uses the sender’s reputation as a critical factor. If you (the sender) follow legitimate and best email practices, they will deliver your email to the receiver’s inbox, or else mark it as spam.
Email Deliverability
Email spam traps can impact your email delivery rates. It works on the above concept of analysing a sender's email list by ISP or ESP.
List Quality
Email spam traps cause issues for those email marketers who do not refine their lists regularly. If you're not regularly cleaning and maintaining your email list, it increases the likelihood of having spam traps on your list.
Legal compliance
When using email marketing, a sender must follow certain legal requirements. Email spam traps are a violation of those anti-spam laws and regulations. As a result, the sender may have to face legal consequences for sending such emails.
Wasted Resources
Sending emails to spam traps decreases your user engagement rate and marketing effectiveness. Hence, it is essential to look after your email lists of targeted users and maintain them.
How can Notifly help with the spam email trap?
Now that you have learned the causes of the email spam trap, you need a support system that provides insights into your email notifications. Notifly helps businesses and email marketers identify the critical aspects of email marketing, such as their delivery rate, open rate, and more. Knowing these metrics can help you identify the emails that are outdated, inactive, or incorrect and refine the email list as well.
