Guide to Avoiding Spam Traps With Email Validation Tools

Every B2B or B2C marketer who’s ever dealt with email campaigns and communications have heard of the term “spam trap”. This nasty term is every professional email marketer’s nightmare.

In Part I of the article series "Spam Traps 101", we’re looking more closely into what spam traps are and what are the types of spam traps that exist. Read the previous article ->

How do you hit a spam trap?

The most dominant use case is the simplest one – imagine you bought an email list from a third-party, which compiled this list from publicly available and private sources. Chances are that the list you bought contain spam traps, since (ISPs) and blacklist providers seed spam traps by adding them to added to bulk mailing lists that get sold to people.

As soon as your email campaign hits the spam trap, it can severely jeopardize your sender reputation, cause bounce rates to increase and decrease deliverability of your mass emails.

How do you avoid spam traps?

There are two best practices to follow at all times that minimize your chances of hitting spam traps:

1. Use confirmed opt-in – always require your website visitors to verify their email address when they’re filling out the lead registration forms. That way you’re significantly improving the quality of your data and reducing the chance of hitting a spam trap.
2. Use email validation (aka email verification) tools – always run an email validation process against the new emails you’re collecting from your leads.
3. Do not purchase any email lists from the third parties.

Spam trap is every professional email marketer’s nightmare

How can email validation tools help avoid spam traps?

Email validation software automatically checks multiple parameters of every email address. Here are some of them:

• Check if the email address is RFC822 / RFC2822compliant
• Determine if the email address is associated with a disposable or temporary email service (e.g. mailinator, 10minutemail)
• SMTP and MX records need to be set up correctly in order for an email server to receive and send emails
• See the full list here

The email validation needs to be set up as a continuous process that runs automatically against your data and returns back the results automatically in the form of Email Quality Score (EQS) ranging from 0 to 1. Our recommendation is you should never accept emails with email quality score below 0.25. The best practice would be to remove them from your database immediately, before it becomes part of your nurturing and email marketing campaigns.

Also, if you’ve been purchasing email lists, perhaps its time to reconsider this risky strategy not only because of the spam traps, but also due to tightening data security and regulations such as GDPR, even if your company is based outside of the European Union.