Sending email to pristine and recycled spam traps harms your sending reputation and can cause email to land in the spam folder and IP addresses and domains to be placed on blocklists. Preventing spam traps from reaching your email list is better than having to go through the process of removing them since they are difficult to identify.
Using a combination of prevention and removal techniques helps minimize the risk of having spam traps in your email list file.
Preventative tips:
- Don’t purchase email lists.
- Don’t use list harvesting techniques, such as obtaining addresses from Facebook, LinkedIn or other social networks.
- Don’t use email appending services. Data obtained through these services often contain incorrect or old data.
- Use opt-in or confirmed opt-in (COI) consent methods.
- Fight list poisoning
- Use CAPTCHA on your website sign-up form to help identify actual subscribers.
- Add invisible fields (blends in with background) to your sign-up form on your website. Humans will not see the field and won’t fill it out. A computer will fill out the field and you can immediately suppress or delete all addresses that fill out the field.
- Use a real-time list validation service at all points of sign-up. This service helps identify malformed and misspelled domains, unknown users and temporary email addresses. These are all potential sources of spam traps.
- Vet all co-registration partners to ensure they follow best practices for acquiring email addresses. Some co-registration partners do not follow best practices or have protections in place to ensure the quality of the subscribers they send their partners.
- Run all co-registration addresses through an email list validation service.
- Quarantine these addresses on their own IP address until they engage with your email program and prove they are not a spam trap.
- Use COI on all coregistration addresses to affirm consent.
