Don’t Open That (Spam) Trap Door

52 Weeks Later

Dust away the cobwebs of your subscriber list by getting rid of any inactive supporters. In Engaging Networks you can easily identify these with the Email Engagement Score – any supporters with a score of 11 haven’t engaged with your emails for over a year and are effectively disengaged.

Like a zombie stalking the active subscribers on your list, these mailboxes can be used by providers as spam traps that harm your sender reputation, resulting in potential spam/junk folder placement for the rest of your most highly engaged supporters.

Ghosts in the Machine

New list purchases can invite a wealth of hidden beasties into your Engaging Networks account. If the list isn’t scrubbed by a data hygiene check first, you could be importing addresses with typos in them, the domains of which are actually owned by blacklisting companies that operate them as spam traps.

A classic example of this would be ricketmail.com as opposed to rocketmail.com, where ricketmail.com is owned and operated as a spam trap domain by a blacklisting company that then resells the data back to mailbox providers that will penalise you. So get the Ghostbusters on it and have a list hygiene company check any new imports first before you become infested with traps.

Keep your doors locked

Making sure your webforms are secure and locked down will stop any ghouls and goblins from reaching your subscriber list. If spammers or fraudsters do attack one of your forms, then they may well use scripts that will import bogus email addresses into your account. These will affect your sender reputation, or even worse end up as spam traps.

Be sure to use security features in Engaging Networks such as Recaptcha forms and session validation to help keep the (were)wolf from the door, and if you do fall victim to fraudulent submissions to your pages then be sure to remove any bogus accounts using the delete tool.