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Spam Traps 101 - part 3: What can I do?

By Kevin Huxham on February 13th, 2009

Here is our series on Spam Traps and the affect they have on your deliverability. If you missed a previous blog post, here they are:
Spam Traps 101 – part 1: an Introduction
Spam Traps 101 – part 2: Dormant and Blacklist Trap Addresses

What can I do?

  • If you are not already doing so, start confirming your new leads. A trap will never confirm they want to be on your list. It may register as an open, but it will never click on a link to confirm their opt-in which is why it is so important to switch to double opt-in.
  • If you are purchasing leads from an unknown 3rd party, stop - it’s not worth it. Even if you are using a credible list vendor, you can never be certain the list you receive is free of addresses that no longer exist or ever existed in the first place, harvested addresses, spam traps, etc. The only way to ensure the people on your list confirmed they want to receive email from you is to build the list yourself and in a manner that is consistent with best practice.
  • Keep your lists up to date. Make sure you are sending at least once every 6 months and remove hard bounces accordingly. If you have not sent anything to these people in 6 months, you should send a reconfirmation email explaining how you got their address and that if they wish to continue receiving your emails they will need to reply or click the link below to reconfirm their opt-in status.
  • If you are changing providers, make sure your do not resend to any hard bounces. Find out how they are handling these bounces and that the list you receive from them is clean.

How can I remove a trap ?

  1. Start confirming new leads.
  2. Send a reconfirmation email (with no promotional content at all) and include a link to reconfirm their opt-in status and remove anyone that does not do so.

Whichever of these you decide to go with, it’s important to understand that without implementing Step 1 and confirming new leads, you risk adding another trap to your list and going through this process all over again.

2009 has already proven it’s a time for change. It’s a time to learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of others, because we can’t possibly make them all ourselves. Don’t waste this opportunity to start the year in the right direction! Yes We Can!

Bye for now,
Kevin Huxham, Director of Deliverability
If you have any questions, Kevin can be reached at: postmaster@cakemail.com or feel free to use our Help Desk.

Filed under: Best practices, Deliverability — No Comments »

CakeMail Leaning Green

By Isabel Lapointe on February 9th, 2009

The essence of our business is naturally green - email marketing inherently means less paper waste. For the most part we even keep our other transactions paperless. But what else can we do?

Our servers hosted in Montreal use hydro electricity, which we could qualify as relatively green. This type of electricity is renewable and so has a lower impact on pollution when compared to thermal power stations, which produce electricity from coal or gas combustion, or central nuclear power. We haven’t yet had an option for a solar or wind energy hosting service.

Most of our servers are also low consumption. The servers we began working with were Mac Mini but we recently switched to Dell Studio Hybrid as Apple hasn’t updated their Mini. Of course, these servers are arranged in a highly redundant and load-balanced configuration. What’s interesting is, since our servers are made with portable components, they are more efficient.

As we became more environmentally friendly at CakeMail, George, our head of technology, looked into the energy consumption of the servers. He tells us, “I decided to measure our consumption and compare it to a regular rackmount-type server. For the Mini and Hybrid I got a maximum of 0.4 A, compared to the ‘gluttonous’ servers that each use more than 2.0 A. This number is more than 4 times what our servers use. I tested them both during stress periods, when machines were copying files and processors were supporting a 100% load. Even when the electricity requirements were not the same, the configurations were quite similar.”

We are also working on an email-recycling program. We carefully dismantle all bounced emails character by character, cleaning each letter with phosphate-free soap and reuse them in brand new email mailings!

So as you can see, we’re not perfect but we’re working towards our greener goal.

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Spam Traps 101 - part 2: Dormant and Blacklist Trap Addresses

By Kevin Huxham on February 3rd, 2009

Here is our series on Spam Traps and the affect they have on your deliverability. If you missed the previous blog post, here it is:
Spam Traps 101 – part 1: an Introduction

Dormant Traps
The 1st kind are used by ISPs and are usually addresses that have been dormant for a long period of time and this can vary anywhere from a few years to as little as 6 months. These addresses would have returned a hard bounce during this time but now no longer receive email, other than to catch this sort of activity. Generally these addresses will not result in a blacklisting because they may in fact have opted into your list at some point, but sending too many to a particular ISP can severely damage your reputation. It’s basically telling the receiver that your list is very old and/or you are not removing hard bounces properly.

*Something I think is worth nothing here (especially when switching providers), it is paramount you make sure the data you are putting into the new system is as clean as possible. I have seen this happen many times, where a company who has been sending for years to a clean list changes providers and for whatever reason, the hard bounces get uploaded again as ‘available’ - which is obviously extremely bad and opens the flood gates for traps. You need to make sure you know exactly how your old provider has been handling your hard bounces. Have they been removing them or just ‘labelling’ them (which would mean they are still in the list on export)? Some providers can also assign a numerical value to an email address status, which only their system can recognise so you need to be very careful not to import these into the new system.

Blacklist Traps
The 2nd kind of trap is the worst and the most damaging. These are addresses that exist for the sole purpose of getting your IP(s) and/or Domain blacklisted. They are used by Blacklists to catch people harvesting email addresses off the internet or people purchasing lists from a 3rd party. As mentioned in a Return Path Q2 Deliverability Benchmark Study people who have been blacklisted saw a significant decrease in their delivery rate and it severely damaged their reputation.

Bye for now,

Kevin Huxham, Director of Deliverability

If you have any questions, Kevin can be reached at: postmaster@cakemail.com or feel free to use our Help Desk.

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Spam Traps 101 - part 1: an Introduction

By Kevin Huxham on February 2nd, 2009

Hello again, after reading a slew of articles that keep pouring into my inbox about Email Marketing projections for 2009, I’ve noticed there is quite a lot of talk of Spam traps and blacklists. ReturnPath’s Stephanie Miller wrote an excellent post in particular about kicking off the new year in the right direction that is definitely worth a mention: 3 Stats To Kick Off The New Year Right . In it she not only talks about how important Email marketing is in today’s economy, but also the affect just one trap hit can have on your deliverability.

I’ve had several people ask me in the past “What is a Spam trap?” and “How did it get on my list??” so it’s clear this continues to be a very grey area for Email Marketers and today I’d like to fix that.

What is a Spam trap or ‘planted’ address? Very simply, it’s an address you don’t want on your list!

The term “trap” is very appropriate, in that these addresses are put out there to catch people either not using proper list building practices, people harvesting emails, purchasing lists from a 3rd party, or marketers who have very poor list hygiene (whether knowingly or not*). These trap addresses are kept secret to protect their identity and are released to no one. Why? Well making them public would render them rather useless if you think about it.

Bye for now,

Kevin Huxham, Director of Deliverability

If you have any questions, Kevin can be reached at: postmaster@cakemail.com or feel free to use our Help Desk.

Next time: Spam Traps 101 – part 2: 2 basic kinds of trap addresses

Filed under: Deliverability — No Comments »
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