In today's post we will talk about one of the problems that affect majority of email marketing businesses – Spam Traps! Do you know how the Spam Trap works and how it can affect your e-mail marketing campaigns?

They can be described as tools used by various email providers such as (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc) to identify unwanted email senders. In turn, unwanted e-mail is called SPAM, which is usually sent by those who seek as many email addresses as possible and then send to them mass messages. 

If you run a company and send unsolicited emails, it means that you do not follow good e-mail marketing practices as your recipients did not opt-in to receive your messages from you. In this case you are Spammer and you may not even realize how serious accusation it is!

To understand a little bit more about sending email campaign issues, let's present the following situation: After sending an unwanted email campaign, one of the recipients sends your e-mail address to the Gmail Spam Trap and from now on you are identified as Spammer and are unable to send new email marketing campaigns to any Gmail accounts. What would you do in this situation? Is it worth taking the risk? Can you really afford it?

There are two types of Spam Traps:

• Pure spam traps – they are described as “the worst” and really harm your sender reputation. Once you have been caught by these spam traps, it will be really difficult for you to deliver e-mails to an Inbox. Be aware that pure spam traps are set up with the sole purpose of catching spammers, so if you are one of them bear in mind it's just the matter of time to get identified, and punished.
  
  
• Recycled spam traps – email addresses that have existed sometime in the past but at the moment they are inactive and they have been taken over by Internet Service Providers. This type of spam is “less aggressive” as it sends alerts for a certain period of time informing about the inactivity of the account. If you are a marketer you should consider removing inactive email addresses from your list. If you don't do it, IPS will change those email addresses into recycled spam traps.
  
  

These traps are created by the ISP with the purpose of making the web a better environment with fewer email spammers. Their effort is made in order to block addresses that dispatch unsolicited e-mails to those who do not want to receive them.

You may be asking yourself: Do I have a Spam Trap in my email list? It depends, but for sure you can take some action to avoid the possibility of getting it, ex.

Do not buy e-mail lists

This is the shortest way to get punished! Purchased e-mail addresses are probably old, inactive and are very likely to be invalid. In addition, probably many of them were collected illegally and their users did not “opt-in” to receive your notification, so if you carry on sending your e-mails to them you may be reported as a spammer.

So, is it worth risking the reputation of your business?

What about sending email campaigns to inactive subscribers or very old e-mails from your contact list? Well...it's not a good idea either, as in this case there are big chances for these emails to become Spam Traps. 

How to Avoid Spam Traps

The only way to prevent your online communication from being caught by Spam Traps is to “look after” your contact list. Always remember to update it, delete inactive contacts, acquire new e-mail addresses via an opt-in, soft opt-in or double opt-in option and never forget to follow the email marketing best practices.

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