Spamtraps on the brain

I really dislike whomever it was that coined the term pristine spamtraps. I get what they were trying to do, explain the different kinds of spamtraps and how different traps get on your list in different ways. Except… any type of trap can end up on your list in any way.

For instance, not every recycled trap shows up on a list because bounce handling is bad. Sometimes, people input their old addresses they never use anymore into forms, not knowing that address is now a recycled spamtrap. In other cases, an address was entered into enough forms by random people that the original owner had to abandon it and then handed over the resulting mail feed to spamtrap maintainers.

Likewise, not every pristine trap is pristine. Unless a domain has been continuously owned by the spamtrap maintainer for the past two decades, they don’t know what the history of the address was. Maybe it was a domain that was never registered and it actually is a pristine domain. Alternatively, it could have belonged to a startup and been used for a couple years before falling back into the available domain pool.

In the early days of deliverability we often blamed spamtraps for blocking. It made sense. Senders couldn’t argue they had permission to mail spamtraps. They didn’t, they couldn’t, there was no one using that address in order to give meaningful permission.

What I’m seeing now among some senders, though, is an almost laser like focus on spamtraps as the one metric to rule them all. Senders, and ESPs, are heavily weighting the data they get back from the commercial sensor networks. And, let’s be honest here, while the public writings of the companies describe them as sensor networks and are careful to avoid the spamtrap terminology, almost everyone else calls them spamtraps.

Spamtraps are not the problem. They’re a signal. Spamtraps tell us that there is something wrong with how addresses are being collected or maintained. They indicate what problems we need to fix in order to get good delivery. No one really cares if spammers send mail to abandoned or unread email addresses. What really matters is that a subscription process lets any email address be added without doing anything to verify that address belongs to the person sending it.

Right now, of the data hygiene tools do anything to link the address input into a form with the person providing the address. They’ll remove potential spamtraps and bad addresses, but that’s it. We can remove bouncing addresses and make lists look clean. Still, it’s not enough in the age of engagement based filters. In order to get to the inbox you need to send mail people want.

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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.

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Not fooling anyone…

A question came up on the Women of Email Facebook page about sending cold B2B emails. This is one of those areas I have strong opinions about, mostly because I am so tired of getting deceptive and unending messages from folks.
Realistically, cold emailing isn’t going to stop just because recipients hate receiving it. We haven’t wiped out spam in 20+ years, we’re not going to manage it for this one tiny piece. But I do think there are things senders can do to minimize the amount of frustration their spam creates.

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