Troubleshooting spam traps

What can I do to reduce spam traps now?

1. Establish an on-going process for actively removing subscribers that are both aged and inactive
2. Following a spam trap hit, isolate any new data that was sent within the last 24 hours. This will define which set of emails or segment contained the trap hit. (Example: If the total file is 1M addresses, this segment or section of the file with the trap hit might be 100,000 email addresses
3. Divide the email segments into a smaller sub-set of addresses that can you mail, to determine which sub-set contains the spam trap hit. (Example: create 10 sub-sets out of the file with 10,000 email addresses each).
4. Mail each of the subsets in turn over a period of time to see if you continue to hit a trap. (Example: Mail a single sub-set every day over a 10 day period).
5. If the segment doesn’t contain a trap hit you can add it back to the main segment or file knowing that it is clean at this point in time.
6. If the segment does contain a trap hit you can continue to break the emails down to smaller subsets and continue steps 3-5. You can also send a re-opt-in email notifying users that they will need to opt-in to your email again or else they will no longer continue receiving email from your brand. Then remove the addresses or segment of addresses that do not respond from your file.
7. Ensure that a bounce, opt-out, or suppression file was not mailed.
8. Review old inactive data to determine if the risk mailing to these addresses is worth hitting a spam trap. Remember, spam traps will not open, click URLs, or make online purchases.

How do I prevent Future spam trap hits?

1. Consider implementing a double opt-in subscription process. Each time you get a new subscriber, send them an email requiring that they click on the confirmation URL to confirm their subscription. Remember, spam traps will not click through so this is a very effective way to prevent traps from staying on your lists.
2. Make sure your address collection process automatically excludes/removes:
• abuse@ and postmaster@ addresses,
• malformed addresses with misspelled domains (i.e. me@hotmai.lcom)
• role accounts (i.e. sales@company.com, customerservice@company.com)
• nonsensical email addresses (ex. 123abc@xyz987.com)
3. When receiving subscriptions from third party partners, affiliates, or list services:
• Test a sample of the file from a separate IP space and monitor spam trap hits before adding the file to your database.
• Review the partner data file to ensure malformed, role account, nonsensical addresses are removed.
• Mail partner data from separate IP space to monitor on-going data quality.
• Regularly audit the partner's sign-up process to ensure that it meets industry best practices for address collection.
4. Establish hard and soft bounce rules appropriate to your sending practices. Remove unknown users on the first 5xx bounce when it says something such as "email address does not exist" or "unknown user" in the description. Be sure you do not remove 5xx bounce emails when caused by "spam violations", "spam policies", etc.
5. Implement a companywide suppression list of accumulated complaints, unsubscribes and removed inactive addresses
6. Establish an on-going process for actively removing subscribers that are both old and inactive.
7. On sign up pages ask customers to type the email address twice to prevent "fat fingering" mistakes which could unintentionally be a spam trap address.