Spam Traps Growing Like Wildfire!

Hope you enjoyed your Memorial Day!

First, I’d like to thank all of those who lost their lives serving our country so that we can live with the freedoms that we have.

Let’s take a brief moment of silence…

…now back to the agenda at hand. As stated in the Subject Line, Spam Traps are about to get a large injection of traps according to Gmail and Yahoo/AOL.

Thanks for the heads up based on a tweet (are they still called tweets now that is officially X) from Sendlane’s Jimmy Kim…

It’s probably a great time to do a little housekeeping with your email lists.

Housekeeping Before Summer (List Hygiene)

If you haven’t purged your list recently, I highly recommend you take those steps now. Not just for these spam traps, but the new sender requirements coming into effect June 1, 2024.

Delete Subscribers Who Have Never Engaged

If you have contacts on your list that are over 3 months old and have never opened or clicked an email, it’s safe to say the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

These emails that have never engaged have a higher chance of becoming spam traps than emails that showed some sort of engagement signal on your list.

There are zero reasons to try and activate these people as they were never engaged subscribers to begin with.

You should have a set policy in place on how long you give a subscriber to engage with your email before you simply remove them from your list.

Re-Validate Your Data

If you’ve been emailing as long as I have, then you surely have a large portion of your list that has not engaged and has been sunsetted from your list.

If you have a re-engagement (re-activation) strategy, I highly recommend you send your non-engaged subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails in over a year to be validated.

They might be emails that were left behind as the owner got a new email to get rid of the build-up of spam and unwanted content from years of use.

You can use any number of the validation services below:

• Email Oversight

• BriteVerify by Validity

• ZeroBounce

• NeverBounce

• Xverify

Following the two strategies above of purging old data that never engaged and re-cleaning data that has not engaged in some time are best practices you should implement on an ongoing basis.

To staying out of the traps,
Chris Miquel

Follow me on Twitter: @miqchris