Recycled spamtraps

Spamtraps strike fear into the heart of senders. They’ve turned into this monster metric that can make or break a marketing program. They’ve become a measure and a goal and I think some senders put way too much emphasis on spamtraps instead of worrying about their overall data accuracy.

Recently I got a question from a client about the chances that any address they were currently mailing would turn into a recycled spamtrap. Assuming both a well behaved outbound mail server and a well behaved spamtrap maintainer the answer is never. Well behaved spamtrap maintainers will reject every email sent to one of their spamtrap feeds for 6 – 12 months. Some reject for longer. Well behaved mail servers will remove addresses that consistently bounce and never deliver.

Of course, not everyone is well behaved. There are maintainers who don’t actively reject mail, they simply pull the domain out of DNS for years and then start accepting mail. Well behaved mail servers can cope with this, they create a fake bounce when the get NXDomain for an address and eventually remove the address from future mailings. There have been cases in the past where spamtrap maintainers purchase expired domains and turn them into spamtraps immediately. No amount of good behaviour on the part of the sender will cope with this situation.

On the flip side some MTAs never correctly handle any undeliverable address when the reason is anything other than a direct SMTP response. Generally these are built on the open source MTAs by people who don’t realise there are mail failures outside of SMTP failures.

There are three general cases where recycled spamtraps will show up on a list.

  1. A list has been improperly bounce handled.
  2. An address has not been mailed for more than a year.
  3. Someone signs up an address that’s a recycled spamtrap (same as how a pristine trap will get added to a list)

ESPs have to worry about recycled spamtraps in another common case. A new customer brings over a list and decides to retry addresses that their previous ESP marked as bounced. (It happens. Regularly.)

Recycled addresses are a sign that there is a problem with the long term hygiene of a list. As with any spamtrap, they’re a sign of problems with data collection and maintenance. The traps aren’t the problem, they’re just a symptom. Fix the underlying issue with data maintenance and traps cease to be an actual issue.

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Dueling data

One of the things I miss about being in science is the regular discussions (sometimes heated) about data and experimental results. To be fair, I get some of that when talking about email stuff with Steve. We each have some strong view points and aren’t afraid to share them with each other and with other people. In fact, one of the things we hear most when meeting folks for the first time is, “I love it when you two disagree with each other on that mailing list!” Both of us have engineering and science backgrounds, so we can argue in that vein.
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One of the challenges of seemingly contradictory data is figuring out why it seems to disagree. Of course, in science the first step is always to look at your experimental design and data collection. Did I do the experiment right? (Do it again. Always do it again.) Did I record the data correctly? Is the design right? So what did I do differently from what you did? For instance, at one of my labs we discovered that mixing a reagent in plastic tubes created a different outcome from mixing the reagent in glass vials. So many variables that you don’t even think of being variables that affect the outcome of an experiment.

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Incentivizing incites fraud

There are few address acquisition processes that make me cringe as badly as incentivized point of sale collection. Companies have tried many different ways to incentivize address collection at the point of sale. Some offer the benefit to the shopper, like offering discounts if they supply an email address. Some offer the benefits to the employee. Some offer punishments to the employee if they don’t collect addresses from a certain percentage of customers.
All of these types of incentive programs are problematic for email collection.
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On the shopper side, if they want mail from a retailer, they’ll give an address simply because they want that mail.  In fact, asking for an address without offering any incentive is way more likely to get their real address. If they don’t want mail but there is a financial incentive, they’re likely to give a made up address. Sometimes it will be deliverable, but belong to another person. Sometimes it will be undeliverable. And sometimes it will be a spamtrap. One of my delivery colleagues occasionally shares addresses she’s found in customer lists over on her FB page. It’s mostly fun stuff like “dont@wantyourmail.com” and “notonyour@life.com” and many addresses consisting of NSFW type words.
On the employee side there can also be abuses. Retailers have tried to tie employee evaluations, raises and promotions to the number of email addresses collected. Other retailers will actively demote or fire employees who don’t collect a certain number of addresses. In either case, the progression is the same. Employees know that most customers don’t want the mail, and they feel bad asking. But they’re expected to ask, so they do. But they don’t push, so they don’t get enough addresses. Eventually, to protect their jobs, they start putting in addresses they make up.
Either way, incentivizing point of sale collection of information leads to fraud. In a case I read about in the NY Times, it can lead to fraud much more serious than a little spam. In fact, Wells Fargo employees committed bank fraud because of the incentives related to selling additional banking products at the teller.

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