You may have received an email from our deliverability team that your account has been suspended ue to hitting spam traps or are just curious to learn more about email deliverability. You'll find all the answers you need here.
What is a spam trap?
A spam trap is an email address that is not actively used but is actively monitored by anti-spam organizations like Spamhaus, security companies like McAfee and ISPs to find marketeers who add contacts and send emails to their lists without permission.
There are different type of spam traps and they have different ways to end up on your list. Here's a good overview by Spamhaus about the different types of spam traps.
How serious are spam traps?
Consequences for hitting spam traps can range in severity, depending on which kind you hit, the organization running it, and how often you hit it. On the extreme side, the IP address from which the emails are sent from can be blocked and as multiple users use the same IP address at Outfunnel this can affect a large number of users.
This is why we take this very seriously and once we detect that a user sends emails to a spam trap their email sending is immediately suspended and our deliverability team reaches out to understand the issue better.
💡 Spam traps are always a sign of poor email hygiene and data collection practices so the key question is how did a spam trap get on your list.
How can you identify a spam trap email address?
While some spam traps can be identified via email cleaning services then majority of them are kept secret and are not revealed by their owners.
Attempting to locate and remove traps only treats the symptom and not the underlying problem. That’s why the solution isn’t just finding and removing the spam trap but instead it's important to improve your data collection processes and data hygiene.
How can I keep my list free of spam traps?
Whether you’ve hit a spam trap or not, it’s always a good idea to maintain a clean list.
Make it a habit to remove unengaged contacts from your list if they haven't engaged for 6 months.
Run your list through a service like myemailverifier.com to detect obvious typos and invalid emails
Use double opt-in confirmation for contacts that sign up via form before sending emails to them
Never purchase lists. This is a sure way to hit spam traps.
PS. Outfunnel automatically cleans bounced email addresses so you don't need to worry about this.