Poisoning Spamtraps

Today’s question comes from Dave in yesterday’s comment section.

I wonder if spammers might submit harvested addresses to big-name companies known to not use confirmed opt-in just to poison what they believe might be spamtraps?

It’s certainly possible that people submit addresses to forms and big-name companies. But I don’t really think that poisons the spamtrap.
Depending on who is running the trap a couple of things can happen.

  1. The big company is added to a blocklist. I have dealt with SBL listings of multiple Fortune 50 companies and a host of other national and international brands. Major brands do get blocked and blocklisted repeatedly for sending to trap addresses. And in many cases they’ve had to implement confirmed opt-in to get delisted. In a couple cases, the solution involved corporate wide changes in database and email address handling.
  2. The trap is part of a scoring system and the other mail from that same sender doesn’t result in blocking. For instance, Yelp has been spamming the address of mine harvested off the blog. Other people have mentioned they’re getting Yelp mail to trap addresses. But the vast majority of Yelp’s mail is legitimate and the recipients want it. At most places they won’t be blocked for mailing to that address.

In all cases, it is the responsibility of the sender to verify they have permission to mail an address. If they fail to do that, and end up adding a spamtrap (or other address that doesn’t belong to the submitter) to their mailing list, they are not sending permission email. For many trap maintainers this is enough evidence to drive an entry on a blocklist. For scoring systems, it’s more about the overall mail stream than one or two trap hits.
I’d say that the only thing that can really poison a trap is revealing it or publicly admitting a particular address is a trap. Even in those cases I’m not really sure that’s true, though. My own experience suggests that many spammers, particularly the affiliate types, are too incompetent to suppress trap addresses. In a couple of instances, I’ve been working with clients who have delivery problems related to their use of affiliates. Often I will dig into my own spam corpus for examples of spam pointing to my company. I do turn over trap addresses to the spammers. They still send those addresses spam.
===
Have a question you want answered? Tweet them to wise_ laura or send them to laura-questions@wordtothewise.com.
 
 
 

Harvesting and forging email addresses
It's Thursday: AOL must be having problems

Related Posts

Harvesting and forging email addresses

For the contact address on our website, Steve has set up a rotating set of addresses. This is to minimize the amount of spam we have to deal with coming from address harvesters. This has worked quite well. In fact it works so well I didn’t expect that publishing an email address for taking reader questions would generate a lot of spam.
Boy, was I wrong. That address has been on the website less than a month and I’m already getting lots of spam to it. Most of it is business related spam, but there’s a couple things that make me think that someone has been signing that address up to mailing lists.
One is the confirmation email I received from Yelp. I don’t actually believe Yelp harvested my address and tried to create me an email account. I was happy when I got the first mail from Yelp. It said “click here to confirm your account.” Yay! Yelp is actually using confirmations so I just have to ignore the mail and that will all go away.
At least I was happy about it, until I started getting Yelp newsletters to that address.
Yelp gets half a star for attempting to do COI, but loses half for sending newsletters to people who didn’t confirm their account.
I really didn’t believe that people would grab a clearly tagged address off the blog and subscribe it to mailing lists or networking sites. I simply didn’t believe this happened anymore. I know forge subscribing used to be common, but it does appear that someone forge signed me up for a Yelp account. Clearly there are more dumb idiots out there than I thought.
Of course, it’s not just malicious people signing the address up to lists. There are also spammers harvesting directly off the website.
I did expect that there would be some harvesting going on and that I would get spam to the address. I am very surprised at the volume and type of spam, though. I’m getting a lot of chinese language spam, a lot of “join our business organization” spam and mail claiming I subscribed to receive their offers.
Surprisingly, much of the spam to this address violates CAN SPAM in some way shape or form. And I can prove harvesting, which would net treble damages if I had the time or inclination to sue.
It’s been an interesting experience, putting an unfiltered address on the website. Unfortunately, I am at risk of losing your questions because of the amount of spam coming in. I don’t think I’ve missed any, yet, but losing real mail is always a risk when an address gets a lot of spam – whether or not the recipient runs filters.
I’m still pondering solutions, but for now the questions address will remain as it is.

Read More

Dear Email Address Occupant

There’s a great post over on CircleID from John Levine and his experience with a marketer sending mail to a spam trap.
Apparently, some time back in 2002 someone opted in an address that didn’t belong to them to a marketing database. It may have been a hard to read scribble that was misread when the data was scanned (or typed) into the database. It could be that the person didn’t actually know their email address. There are a lot of ways spamtraps can end up on lists that don’t involve malice on the part of the sender.
But I can’t help thinking that mailing an address for 10 years, where the person has never ever responded might be a sign that the address isn’t valid. Or that the recipient might not want what you’re selling or, is not actually a potential customer.
I wrote a few weeks back about the difference between delivery and marketing. That has sparked conversations, including one where I discovered there are a lot of marketers out there that loathe and despise delivery people. But it’s delivery people who understand that not every email address is a potential purchaser. Our job is to make sure that mail to non-existent “customers” doesn’t stop mail from actually getting to actual potential customers.
Email doesn’t have an equivalent of “occupant” or “resident.” Email marketers need to pay attention to their data quality and hygiene. In the snail mail world, that isn’t true. My parents still get marketing mail addressed to me, and I’ve not lived in that house for 20+ years. Sure, it’s possible an 18 year old interested in virginia slims might move into that house at some point, and maybe that 20 years of marketing will pay off. It only costs a few cents to keep that address on their list and the potential return is there.
In email, though, sending mail to addresses that don’t have a real recipient there has the potential to hurt delivery to all other recipients on your list. Is one or two bad addresses going to be the difference between blocked and inbox? No, but the more abandoned addresses and non-existent recipients on a list there are on a list, the more likely filters will decide the mail isn’t really important or wanted.
The cost of keeping that address, one that will never, ever convert on a list may mean losing access to the inbox of actual, real, converting customers.
 

Read More

Thanks for your questions!

Thanks, everyone, who submitted questions to laura-questions@wordtothewise.com. We’ve gotten some great questions to answer here on the blog. I’m working through the emails and contacting folks if I have questions. I’ll be answering the first question on Wednesday.
I also did have someone harvest the address off the website and send me non-CAN SPAM compliant spam to it. I have to admit, I didn’t expect someone to harvest the address at all, but especially not within 12 hours of posting an address. Particularly someone who’s not harvested our contact address previously. I also am considering how much content I could get detailing taking the spammer to court in CA for violating CAN SPAM and the CA anti-spam statute.
 

Read More