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.
ThatsFunny
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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It's not about the spamtraps

I’ve talked about spamtraps in the past but they keep coming up in so many different discussions I have with people about delivery that I feel the need to write another blog post about them.
Spamtraps are …
… addresses that did not or could not sign up to receive mail from a sender.
… often mistakenly entered into signup forms (typos or people who don’t know their email addresses).
… often found on older lists.
… sometimes scraped off websites and sold by list brokers.
… sometimes caused by terrible bounce management.
… only a symptom …

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Thoughts on Data Hygiene

zombieemailOne of the big deliverability vs. marketing arguments has to do with data hygiene and dropping inactive users. Marketers hate that deliverability people tell them to let subscribers go after a long time of no activity from the subscriber.
Data hygiene is good. Email is not permanent and not forever, and the requirements for data hygiene in the email space are very different than the requirements in the postal mail space. There is no such thing as “dear occupant” in email. I mean, you can sent to occupant, but the occupant can then hit the this is spam button. Too many emails to “occupant” and mail goes to bulk instead of the inbox. These are real risks.
With that being said, there are a lot of things to consider when putting together a data hygiene program. You’re looking to remove people who are no longer interested in your brand as much as they are no longer interested in your mail. You’re trying to suss out who might have abandoned the email address you have for them. It’s complicated.
I’ve worked with a lot of clients over the years to implement data hygiene programs. Sometimes those programs were to deal with a bulk foldering issue. Other times clients have been trying to address a SBL listing. Still other clients were just looking for better control over their email and delivery. In all cases, my goal is to identify and classify their recipients into 3 groups: addresses we know are good, addresses we know are bad, and then addresses we don’t know about.
Good addresses get mailed. Bad addresses get dumped. The challenging bit is what do we do with the unknown addresses? That’s when we start looking at other data the client may have. Purchases? Website visits? What do we have to work with and what else do we know about the people behind the addresses. Once we’ve looked at the data we design a program to take the addresses we don’t know about and drop them into either the good or the bad bucket. How we do that really depends on the specifics of the company, their program and their data. But we’ve had good success overall.
There’s been a lot of discussion on hygiene this week, after Mailchimp published a blog post looking at the value of inactive subscribers. They found something that I don’t find very surprising, based on my observations across hundreds of clients over the years.

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