Classic and seed spamtraps are the spamtraps that fall under the category of being “pristine” traps, meaning they never opt in to receiving email and are either randomly found or are picked up by website scrapers. 

A dead address spamtrap is one that formerly belonged to someone, but has been abandoned. After a period of 12-18 months of that email address sending back a bounce, it’s turned back into a legitimate email address that considers any further inbound email to be spam. 

Typo traps are the trickiest to work with simply because you might hit them through your prospects mistyping an email address on a form. For example, I could type in “skyler@gamil.com” instead of typing in gmail.com…and someone happens to own gamil.com….which they’ve turned into a spamtrap domain and now think there’s something wrong with your lists. 

You don’t have to learn the codes. But it can be very helpful if you search for them when you face the challenge. Especially if you want to get the most out of your email list by reducing your email bounce rate.
For example, if your email bounce rate is high (hard or/and soft), you can:

• correct emails with syntax errors
• fix typos
• send again to contacts who couldn’t receive it thanks to a technical issue
• realize if an email provider blacklisted you
• and more.

But you have to know the bounce codes in order to solve these difficulties. Therefore we collected them for you.

About a month ago, Spamhaus began “listing” senders who were using explicit opt-in (a pretty high standard in email marketing) as a method of address collection. There are different flavors of Spamhaus listings, but the one we want to avoid as legit marketers, is the SBL listing. Once added to the listing database, mail providers begin to pick-up this listing and use it to block those IP’s.

An SBL listing is a pretty devastating thing to happen to any email program, and it in effect renders a halt to the email program. Doesn’t make much sense to send email when most of the recipient providers are just going to block it.

Theoretically this rash of listings began with a series of “list bombs” that has grown. A list bomber goes to sign-up forms (it’s not a person, it’s a bot) and enters in email addresses they don’t own. The plan is to sign-up an address to so many places as to render it useless. Well, these list bombers have been targeting websites that don’t confirm email addresses. The address is entered, the email isn’t confirmed, and bam you have a full plate of spam.

We’re in an interesting time right now even with all of the anti-spam talk and regulations that are out there, Spamhaus is interestingly the only real power broker in the blacklisting space. A listing from Spamhaus can basically shut down an email program, because so many ISP’s use the Spamhaus listing as their blacklisting of choice.

Make no mistake about it, getting listed by Spamhaus will ruin your day, and probably cost you some money. A Spamhaus listing is a devastating thing for some marketers, as the listing exposes the weaknesses in their program, and they find out about the ongoing danger.

There is an easy answer to this potential issue. If you use confirmed opt-in, you NEVER have to worry about Spamhaus, or probably any other blacklisting again. That’s right, if you use confirmed opt-in, you are not going to be listed on Spamhaus… ever. For some of you reading this who have never been on this list, you don’t realize how life changing one of these listings can be, you don’t understand the fuss. You won’t feel that way after the listing.