Ep. 323 - What are Spam Traps? EXPERT GUEST: ZeroBounce COO Brian Minick

Summary

Podcast Summary: Ep. 323 - What are Spam Traps?

Title: Do This, NOT That: Marketing Tips with Jay Schwedelson
Host: Jay Schwedelson, GURU Media Hub
Expert Guest: Brian Minick, Chief Operating Officer at ZeroBounce
Release Date: May 3, 2025
Sponsor: Marigold

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1. Introduction to Spam Traps

In Episode 323 of "Do This, NOT That," host Jay Schwedelson welcomes back Brian Minick, COO of ZeroBounce, to delve into the elusive topic of spam traps. Jay emphasizes the importance of understanding spam traps to enhance email marketing strategies and prevent deliverability issues.

Jay Schwedelson [00:08]: "We have Brian Minick, who's the chief operating officer at Zero Bounce, which is the absolute leader in the marketplace as it relates to email validation, data improvement, data hygiene."

2. Understanding Spam Traps

Brian Minick begins by demystifying spam traps, describing them as hidden pitfalls within email databases designed to catch marketers who do not adhere to best practices.

Brian Minick [01:23]: "It's a very sensitive topic... But how do they get created? Where do they come from? How do you get them off? What do you do with these things?"

Definition and Types

Brian explains that spam traps are specific email addresses used to identify and penalize senders who engage in questionable email practices. There are two primary types:

• Pristine Spam Traps: These are email addresses created solely to trap spammers. Sending an email to these addresses results in immediate blacklisting.

  Brian Minick [03:03]: "If you send to it, you're blacklisted immediately... You should never have emailed that email in the first place."

• Recycled Spam Traps: These originate from old, abandoned email accounts that have been repurposed as traps after a period of inactivity.

  Brian Minick [06:34]: "The secondary kind of spam trap is called a recycled spam trap... if you're sending to businesses and consumer emails, you should check every six months as well."

3. The Prevalence of Spam Traps

Jay inquires whether spam traps are a widespread issue affecting all marketers, regardless of industry or list size.

Jay Schwedelson [02:28]: "Does spam traps and trying to deal with spam traps and possibly having them in your databases, is this an everybody problem?"

Brian confirms that spam traps are ubiquitous across both business and consumer email domains.

Brian Minick [02:28]: "Absolutely. So there's, it's on business domains and it's all over, by the way, riddled throughout all these kind of consumer emails."

4. Causes of Spam Traps in Email Lists

The conversation highlights various ways spam traps can infiltrate email lists:

• Purchased Lists and Data Scraping: Spam traps often exist on websites to catch unauthorized data scraping and list purchasing.

  Brian Minick [04:48]: "They’re coming from any of these purchase data sources, scrapers on the web. These emails are published on websites... they're set up as traps."

• Internal Practices: Poor data management by sales teams, such as importing unverified contacts, can introduce spam traps into marketing databases.

  Brian Minick [05:25]: "Salespeople... ingest the most amount of data that comes from God knows where and they're the ones that create all the problems."

5. Impact of Spam Traps on Email Marketing

Sending emails to spam traps can severely damage a sender's reputation, leading to blacklisting and reduced deliverability.

Brian Minick [03:16]: "You're on the blacklist which is going to basically kick you off their mailing platforms and no messages will get delivered because you shouldn't have ever emailed that email in the first place."

Jay summarizes the risk of continuously emailing inactive or unverified contacts without regular cleaning.

Jay Schwedelson [08:18]: "If you don’t have a window of time that I stop saying to people... you're playing with fire."

6. Strategies to Prevent Spam Traps

Brian emphasizes the importance of regular email list maintenance and validation to avoid spam traps.

Brian Minick [10:09]: "If you are on the sales side or you have sales teams that are affecting you... you need to be immediately cleaning that data."

Regular Cleaning Intervals

• Business Emails: Clean every six months to a year.

  Brian Minick [10:09]: "If you're sending to businesses, I would be checking every six months, maybe to a year."

• Consumer Emails: Also recommend cleaning at least every six months due to the higher likelihood of recycled spam traps.

  Brian Minick [10:09]: "Consumer emails... I would do no less than six months there as well."

7. Best Practices for Email List Management

Maintaining a healthy email list involves several best practices:

• Engagement Monitoring: Avoid emailing contacts who haven't engaged in the past one to two years.

  Brian Minick [08:18]: "Why would you email them if they haven't done anything with you in a year, two years?"

• Cross-Department Communication: Ensure that sales and marketing teams collaborate to prevent unverified data from entering marketing lists.

  Brian Minick [05:25]: "If you're in sales, please talk to marketing because they're probably scratching their head trying to figure out what's going on."

8. Role of Email Validation Services

Brian advocates for the use of email validation services like ZeroBounce to proactively identify and eliminate spam traps from email lists.

Jay Schwedelson [12:33]: "You should clean that data up and make sure you start fresh because you're getting a new IP address."

He further explains the benefits of integrating validation services during major platform transitions.

Brian Minick [12:33]: "That's the critical time to do it... It's the time where you have the opportunity to kind of hit a little bit of a reset button and make sure you're starting out of the gate properly."

9. Conclusion and Recommendations

Brian Minick concludes by encouraging marketers to leverage ZeroBounce’s services for maintaining email list hygiene and preventing spam traps.

Brian Minick [15:12]: "Sign up for a free account. You get free credits. You can test everything out and get a good idea of what the service will do."

Jay wraps up by endorsing Brian and ZeroBounce, highlighting the importance of technical understanding in effective email marketing.

Jay Schwedelson [16:00]: "Connect with Brian on LinkedIn. He's one of the few normal people that I've met in the world of email that understands all the technical stuff."

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Key Takeaways:

• Spam Traps Defined: Hidden email addresses used to identify and penalize poor email practices.

• Universal Concern: Both business and consumer email lists are vulnerable to spam traps.

• Regular Maintenance: Clean email lists at least every six months to mitigate risks.

• Collaboration is Crucial: Ensure sales and marketing teams communicate to maintain list integrity.

• Utilize Validation Services: Services like ZeroBounce are essential tools for safeguarding email deliverability.

By understanding and implementing these strategies, marketers can enhance their email campaigns' effectiveness, maintain a positive sender reputation, and avoid the pitfalls associated with spam traps.

Transcript

[Brian Minick]

Foreign.

[Jay Schwedelson]

Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately. You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that. We are back for do this, not that podcast presented by Marigold. And we have a repeat guest. You know that the guest is awesome when we asked him to come back on. And that is the case here. Who do we got? We got Brian Minick, who's the chief operating officer at Zero Bounce, which is the absolute leader in the marketplace as it relates to email validation, data improvement, data hygiene. And we asked Brian to come back because one topic we've never talked about on this show, okay, is spam traps. What exactly are they? Does everybody have to deal with them? How do you get rid of them? Because people kind of talk about them vaguely. But we're going to break it down in real simple terms here, and Brian is the smartest guy I know on this topic. So, Brian, welcome back to the show, man.

[Brian Minick]

Thanks, Jay. Pleasure to be back here. And thanks. It's a very sensitive topic, to be very honest with you. I mean, I hear people freak out about the term, like, it's mysterious, right? Because as simple as the name actually is, it's very descriptive of what exactly it is. But how do they get created? Where do they come from? How do you get them off? What do you do with these things? What kind of problems do they cause? There's a lot of, like, you know, ripple effects of these type of things, and they. They tend to haunt you because they can kind of just bury themselves in your list. It's kind of. I look at them as, like, the bugs in the wall, you know, like, where the hell that thing come from? You know, like, where'd that come from? No, not bed bugs. I don't have any experience with those ones. Jay, don't do that.

[Jay Schwedelson]

All right, let me ask you a question, though. So we're gonna open this up, people listening. Might be a business to business marketer. They might be a consumer marketer. They might have a huge list. They might have a small list. They may be marketing people in the education space or in the health space. All of it. First question is, does spam traps and trying to deal with spam traps and possibly having them in your databases, is this an everybody problem?

[Brian Minick]

Absolutely. So there's, it's on business domains and it's all over, by the way, riddled throughout all these kind of consumer emails. And for me, a consumer email is these yahoos, AOLs, Gmail accounts, Outlooks, whatever it might be, just the generally free provided accounts out there, they're riddled. And so the way that they kind of work on the business side is generally they're created from scratch. That's called a pristine spam trap, if anyone wants to go look that up. And that is intended to be a trap. I, that is, it was built by day one. This is a spam trap. This is an email address. If you send to it, you're blacklisted immediately. No question.

[Jay Schwedelson]

Hold on, let me jump in there though. I need to understand what that means. So yeah, let's first define what is the word spam trap mean? What does blacklist mean? Like what does it mean if you send an email to a quote unquote spam trap?

[Brian Minick]

So if you send an email to a spam trap, you get thrown into this blacklist and imagine it as you're on the, you're on the, you hit the, you hit the club, right? You hit the guard gate at the community you're trying to get in and they're like, nah, you're not going in here. But no matter what you do, there's no approval. You're going to go get, you need to go call the president of the club. That's the only way you're getting it. It's the same exact thing. As soon as you do anything of that nature and you hit this mailbox, that's a spam trap. You're going to be thrown into a blacklist which is going to basically kick you off their mailing platforms and no messages will get delivered because you shouldn't have ever emailed that email in the first place. So that's really what a spam trap is. It's, it's really that quick. Gotcha, right? It's why did you mail this email? You should have never received it. It's not signed up. And to be fair, they're not malicious about it. They don't go hit your forms with these emails, they don't go submit them or sign up or pay, make a payment. So there's no real natural way that you should be receiving these emails. But what that happens is, is they're coming from any of these purchase data sources, scrapers on the web. So these, what, these emails are published on websites and you could actually google them and find Them. But the point is those index, those sites are not made to be scraping data off of. They're set up as traps. It's a speed trap. Think of it that way, right? Like you're not supposed to be speeding, so the cop's waiting for you to speed, you know, and hit you with the laser. It's the same exact concept. You shouldn't be scraping data, you shouldn't be buying lists. So guess where all the spam traps live or on those things.

[Jay Schwedelson]

So, okay, some people out there are like, well, I probably have no spam traps on my list because I never bought data. But let me change everyone's perspective on that. Maybe you have salespeople that is going out there grabbing some data from who knows where, putting into your system, you don't even know they're doing it. They're adding onto forms. Maybe you have really horrible competition and people in your life and they're going on your forms purposely trying to put garbage into your database. Would you say it is more the norm or the exception for someone to have a spam trap on their file if they're not cleaning it and validating and doing these certain steps?

[Brian Minick]

If, if your salespeople are commingling the data, I can guarantee you it's pretty much there. Salespeople are the, the kind of the biggest offenders in, in marketing for email, by the way. So they, they cause the most problems. They ingest the most amount of data that comes from God knows where and they're the ones that create all the problems. And then it's the marketing team to really have to deal with it, by the way. They just keep, oh, that didn't work. Let's send more email. And they just kind of explode the problem. And so what I've found very interesting is when I work with marketing and they don't know what sales is doing, and then I talk to sales teams like, do your marketing team know what you're doing over here? And they're always, the answer is always no. And it's, it mind boggles me. And it's if, if anything, if you're listening, you're in sales, please talk to marketing because they're probably scratching their head trying to figure out what's going on. And vice versa. If you're in marketing, you need to understand what sales is doing and, and is it on your domain and affecting it. So it's really important.

[Jay Schwedelson]

So why, why does a, why do spam traps exist? What does it mean? So you, you, you email to a spam trap. Oh, and now what happens? You go on a blackhost. What does it mean to, to go on a blacklist? Why do they even exist?

[Brian Minick]

So they exist to catch those people that are kind of not following good practices. That is the design. And so there's the secondary kind of spam trap is called a recycled spam trap that is generally found on the yahoos, Gmails, AOLs, whatever, and they're taking those abandoned accounts. So Jay, I'm sure you have one, an AOL account from, you know, whatever, let's not date ourselves here, but an AOL account from back in the day, let's call it, that you haven't logged into in probably 30 years or 20 years, whatever it might be, they may have taken that account and flipped it into a spam trap because maybe you were using it then, maybe you were submitting it, but now it's not active, you haven't been mailing from it, you don't log into it, you don't click, you don't do anything. And so when they turn it into recycled, what it's doing is catching the people that don't pay attention to good email practices, which is, sorry guys, if someone hasn't opened your email in three years and you're still mailing them, what are you doing? Those can be turned into spam traps. And so that's kind of the concept. They want to keep senders on their toes and they want to make sure that content going through the ecosystem is relevant, hitting active people and that people want it. That's always what it comes down to. And engagement and behavior is really the signals behind that.

[Jay Schwedelson]

So all right, is it now it's no longer. You have a window of time. I'm not going to email to anybody that hasn't engaged in something in 12 months, 18 months, two years, whatever. And I'm doing that because I want to improve my metrics and this, that or whatever really you want to be doing that, you want to have that window of time because if you let it just go as long as possible, you just always email to everybody in your database. You are rolling the dice that you're going to be hitting spam traps. Is that fair?

[Brian Minick]

Absolutely. So it's not just about that, that that quantity side, which is always seems to be the top of mind item for a lot of people in marketing is quantity, quantity, quantity. You have to look at recency. Recency has to be a component to some of these things and especially in consumer email, by the way, a lot of people just make these things up and then they bandit them. I mean, they're sick of the spam. Nope, I'm done. How many personal email accounts do you have, Jay, outside of work? Right. I have seven. And they have a purpose, every single one of them. And I'm not scared to leave one behind when I'm like, well, this got out of control. See ya. You know the Apple, Apple stuff as well, how they're kind of allowing you to kind of private label each one and, and do all that and have more control. So that's really what it's about. And consumers want that. They want to be able to have a little bit more control of the email that's coming to them. So you have to follow good practices. And engagement is one of them. Why would you email them if they haven't done anything with you in a year, two years?

[Jay Schwedelson]

All right, so we now know what a spam trap is. We know that they can appear on any business database. They can appear in any consumer database. And if you, it doesn't matter the size of your database either. I know you're at zero bounce. You're on the show at zero bounce. Great service. No offense to you when I say this, there's a lot of services out there that are not as good at zero bounce, of course, as you are about doing all the validation and all the removal of all this stuff. But there happens to be a lot of companies that do it. And the reason I say that is in order to play the email game, right, Is it table stakes now that you should be using a service like a zero bounce? If not zero bounce, another one. And how often at the bare minimum, should you be using a service like this to remove and eliminate spam traps as best you can?

[Brian Minick]

Yeah. So on this, on the spam trap specifically, it's really going to all depend upon your data sources, where you get that from and how you kind of acquire it. But if, if you are on the sales side or you have sales teams that are affecting you and that's blending into your data, as a marketer, you need to be, that needs to be happening every time that data, data ingestion process comes in. That's immediate. You want to catch that stuff. Now if it's just, hey, I've had an email list and I'm, I'm doing all the right things. I'm, I'm checking all the right boxes. Right. And I'm conscious of all this. If you're sending to businesses, I would be checking every six months, it maybe to a year. Now if we're only talking about spam traps, but there's so many other issues. That's a different topic. Spam traps specifically, they're not exactly popping up here on, on business domains kind of all the time. On recycling in a sense. Now the consumer emails, those are turning and turning into recycled spam traps quite often. I would do no less than six months there as well. Because of that recency factor, there's a trigger. I believe that trigger with Google is two years they've made those emails. I don't know if you have any of those abandoned accounts, Jay, but I've gotten them and they're like, hey, because you put your recovery email in there, so they send to the recovery, hey, you haven't logged in. We're going to deactivate this account. Once that deactivation period happens, they have two choices. Release it out to the public, make it available for someone to acquire again, or create the trap. And so what do they do with it? Of course no one's going to know here in front of the house, but back of the house, they're definitely paying attention to this stuff.

[Jay Schwedelson]

All right, so if I'm listening to this thing, what I got out of that is if I don't have a window of time that I stop saying to people, the bare minimum has got to be two years. I mean, probably should be one year. But if it's longer than 24 months, you're playing with fire, business and consumer. And you should be using some sort of a service every six months to really make sure, not just for spam traps. That's only one of many things you should be removing, but be looking for that. And that way the other big one is, let's say you're considering switching platforms. You're moving from one CRM or one esp, one email sending platform to another. Is it a good idea when you are pulling your data out of one system and then putting it into another that moment in time, is that a good idea to run it through a service, a validation service to give yourself the best possible chance to start out of the gate strong?

[Brian Minick]

Yeah. That is the critical time to do it. Because think about this and ask. You'd have to ask yourself, if you haven't done this for yourself already, why am I moving ESPs? Generally speaking, it's platform or sorry, you know, features or it's going to be results. Right. There's really not great reason. Price sure could might be another one, but. But features and results and results are also dictated by your list and dictated by Your behaviors. And so if you're looking to now go, all right, I'm on ESP A, I'm going to espb. And you want a different result. You also should clean that data up and make sure you start fresh because you're getting a new IP address, by the way, which could be good or bad. Hopefully good. If you know your research, you go dig into that one, see what's going on there. But that's the time where you have the opportunity to kind of hit a little bit of a reset button and make sure you're starting out of the gate properly. Also, that's when the ESPs are really paying attention to you to determine what type of sender you are and what they want to do with you. So there's a lot of people behind the scenes on these big platforms, by the way, big or small, the smaller ones sometimes care even more. They have switches and do not let anyone fool you, they will pull that switch on you. And what that switch means is that, is this a great sender? Are they going to help my whole company? Yes. Put them into a category of an IP address or sending infrastructure that's powerful, that's strong, that creates good signals and it's helping the whole company, by the way. So this is why they would do it. And then, you know, inversely, is this a sender that causes lots of problems on my infrastructure, they get a lot of spam complaints, they hit spam traps. I have to deal with these ISPs. That's the switch they'll pull down on you and they'll put you into a lower quality pool of infrastructure. And by the way, you have no clue. This is all happening. It's happening though. Just be aware of this. And they're judging you because they, they don't want to turn your money away. Some cases they will and they'll kick you off if it's that bad. But they also, if you're kind of bad, you're not great, they'll put you into that lower tier because they don't want to lose the revenue. But they also kind of don't care about your results anymore. They kind of give up on you and they say, eh, well, let's put them with everyone else like this. It's really important. You don't want to fall into that kind of bottom bucket. And every ESP is going to do this.

[Jay Schwedelson]

That's amazing, that's super valuable. And I think people are sleeping on all of this and they're just hoping for the best or they think they put the word free in the subject line and that's all of their problems. I mean, it's ridiculous. All right, so before we wrap up here, now everybody's got to hear about why Zero Bounce is awesome. How to follow you, how to get involved with Zero Bounce. Tell everybody everything. Let's hear it.

[Brian Minick]

Let's do it. So firstly, please connect with me on LinkedIn. Brian Minick, I'm the CEO of Zero Bounce. Very accessible and I love the conversations. I get the most amazing conversations through LinkedIn. Please message me there. Secondly, if you want to come to Zero Bounce, check it out. Don't drop your mic on you and go ahead and you can sign up for a free account. You get free credits. You can test everything out and get a good idea of what the service will do. If you have any of these major tools, integrate with them, breathe with your systems. So as things are churning, we'll churn them out with you. That's something you definitely want to do. And hook up to sign up forms. Intake forms are huge. We're catching typos like I've never seen before. And the amount of data and traffic that's coming with bad data should be caught and you can catch it with these users in real time. So let's get that stuff cleaned up for you. We want to make your email succeed. That is the point.

[Jay Schwedelson]

Listen, everybody should really go and connect with Brian on LinkedIn. He's one of the few normal people that I've met in the world of email that understands all the technical stuff. He's not like this giant nerd that can't have a conversation. So, like, straight up, you want to connect with him. And I'm a huge fan of Zero Bounce. Brian, thanks for being here, man. Appreciate it.

[Brian Minick]

Thank you, thank you. I appreciate it. Good to see you again.

[Jay Schwedelson]

All right, man, take it easy. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over. Subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week week. For more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketers. And hook us up with a five star review. If this wasn't the worst podcast of all time. Lastly, if you want access to the best virtual marketing events that are also 100% free, visit guruevents.com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like Daymond John, Martha Stewart and me. GuruEvents.com check it out.