Spamtraps

There is a lot of mythology surrounding spamtraps, what they are, what they mean, how they’re used and how they get on lists.
Spamtraps are very simply unused addresses that receive spam. They come from a number of places, but the most common spamtraps can be classified in a few ways.

  • Addresses that used to belong to someone and subsequently abandoned. This is where a lot of spamtraps at major ISPs come from.
  • Addresses that were never assigned to anyone, but they just started receiving spam one day. These are frequently used to drive filtering.
  • Addresses that were created and put on websites to track harvesters and web scrapers.  These addresses are frequently used to drive filters and track spammers.

Addresses that belonged to someone and were abandoned are usually “turned off” for a period of time between abandonment and re-purposing as a spam trap. They may return a 550 “user unknown” to any sender, or in some cases the entire domain will have no working mailserver. There are no hard and fast rules for how long the addresses are left unused, but most professionals leave them off for at least a year.
Addresses that were never assigned to anyone are not as common as they used to be. It used to be that some small or mid-size domain owners would turn on their SMTP server to accept all email to any address at that domain, existing or not. Mail to addresses that were not associated with a user would be stored. As the volumes of random mail increased, the spamtraps were used to drive filtering and blocking decisions. This is not as common now because the sheer volume of spam can create bandwidth and storage problems for domain owners.
Addresses that were seeded on websites, or on Usenet, are used for a number of purposes. These addresses often wind up on lists because someone has purchased addresses.
Spamtraps on a mailing list or in a database is a sign that there is some problem with the address acquisition process. As a result, the solution to spamtraps on a list is never just remove the available spamtraps. Instead, you need to figure out what broke and correct the underlying issues.

Related Posts

Blocking of ESPs

There’s been quite a bit of discussion on my post about upcoming changes that ESPs will be facing in the future. One thing some people read into the post is the idea that ISPs will be blocking ESPs wholesale without any regard for the quality of the mail from that company.
The idea that ESPs are at risk for blocking simply because they are ESPs has been floating around the industry based on comments by an employee at a spam filter vendor at a recent industry conference.
I talked to the company to get some clarification on what that spam filtering company is doing and hopefully to calm some of the concerns that people have.
First off, and probably most important, is that the spam filtering company in question primarily targets their service to enterprises. Filtering is an important part of this service, but it also handles email archiving, URL filtering and employee monitoring. The target market for the company is very different than the ISP market.
The ISPs are not talking about blocking indiscriminately, they are talking about blocking based on bad behavior.
Secondly, this option was driven by customer request. The customers of the spam filtering appliance were complaining about “legitimate” mail from various ESPs. Despite being reasonable targeted the mail was unrequested by the recipient. While ESPs use FBLs and other sources of complaints to clean complainers off rented or epended lists at ISPs, the option is not available for mail sent to corporations. Enterprises don’t, nor should they have to, create and support FBLs. Nor should employees be expected to unsubscribe from mail they never requested.
This option is the direct result of ESPs allowing customers to send spam.
Thirdly, this option is offered to those customers who ask for it. It is not done automatically for everyone. The option is also configurable down to the end user.
While I haven’t seen the options, nor which ESPs are affected, I expect that the ones on the list are the ones that the filtering vendor receives complaints about. If you are not allowing your customers to send spam, and are stopping them from buying lists or epending, then you probably have not come to the attention of the filtering company and are not on the list of ESPs to block.

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Bad year coming for sloppy marketers

MediaPost had an article written by George Bilbrey talking about how 2010 could be a difficult year for marketers with marginal practices. George starts off the article by noticing that his contact at ISPs are talking up how legitimate companies with bad practices are causing them problems and are showing up on the radar.
This is something I talked about a few weeks ago, in a series of blog posts looking at the changes in 2010. The signs are out there, and companies with marginal practices are going to see delivery get a lot more difficult. George lists some practices that he sees as problems.

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What really is "spam" anyway?

A few days ago I was reading the attempt by e360 and Dave Linhardt to force Comcast to accept his mail and to stop people posting in the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email from claiming he is a spammer. The bit that pops out at me in this complaint of his, is the fact that he believes that by complying with the minimal standards of the CAN-SPAM act, he is not spamming.
The problem with this claim is that CAN SPAM lists the minimal standards an email must meet in order to avoid prosecution. CAN SPAM does not define what is spam, it only defines the things senders must do in order to not be violating the act. There is no legal definition of spam or of what is not spam.
To add to the confusion there are a number of confusing and contradictory definitions of spam. Definitions people have used over the years include:

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