Spam Trap For Email Marketing

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Nick Wilson

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Emails that host mass email marketing campaigns can run into a bit of trouble when they encounter a spam trap. Most of the spam traps are often found in purchased or rented email lists for quick campaigns. The question people are asking, is how to avoid these spam traps so they can practice effective email marketing.

What Is A Email Spam Trap?

Spam Traps are fairly simple and yet hard to detect at the same time. They are secret, non published email addresses that are used as bait from email list owners. However, these emails are perfectly valid email addresses and they are used for the main purpose of trapping spam, unsolicited email. Most of these emails are inactive or older emails that are not published or used for any purpose, other than a trap. This means that any email that is sent to the address must be spam, because no legitimate, solicited advertisement would be directed there.

The majority of email address that are most likely to be spam are old addresses, webmast@, president@, owner@. You’d be surprised at how many organizations and companies use spam trap email addresses, but your more likely to find larger companies utilizing them.

How Will To Tell If Your Blacklisted

When you send an email to a Spam Trap, you are almost immediately blacklisted and many times it takes the form of a blocked IP address. This makes future messages undeliverable until you remove the spam trap address. Once you are blacklisted you will quickly realize it, so I wouldn’t worry about it unless you’ve been having trouble with our outgoing email lately.
Common Places for Spam Trap Emails:
-Using Email Appending Services
-A Foolish Manual Addition
-Using Older Email Address Lists
-Harvesting addresses
-Purchased Email Address Lists
-Renting Email Address Lists

How To Remove Your Blacklist Status

The best way is to just avoid them altogether, its close to impossible to remove yourself from a blacklist. Many of the blacklists are kept by your ISP (Internet Service Provider) or hosting and are unlikely to tell you which email address is the cause of the blacklisted status. The easiest way to ensure you don’t have a spam trap address is to reconfirm your subscribed readers through a news letter or update of some sort. This will ensure that all current subscribers are real and don’t pose a risk to you as far as blacklisting goes.

Nick Wilson is the owner, primary moderator, and main writer for SEO Journalist, which provides daily articles on website SEO and SMO performance. He is an experienced and versatile, professional SEO Consultant and Internet Marketer.

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