A Guide to Spam Traps and How to Avoid Them

litmus.com

13 points·r0h1n··7 comments

TL;DR: Don't send email to people unless they specifically solicit email from you and confirm their identity.

I.e., don't send unsolicited email.

I.e., don't send spam.

The more interesting for me was Recycled Traps. Often you want to reactivate old users and companies have legitimate reason/access to do so. This part is the more grey area and interesting to see the ISP inactivity rules.

> This part is the more grey area and interesting to see the ISP inactivity rules.

How is it a gray area? The ISP is telling you to stop sending to the address by using hard bounces. If you continue to send to it, you are spamming.

Unless, like their example, you only send email occasionally. In the case that you send 1 email per year, you could hit every one of the listed providers without ever seeing a bounce.

Exactly this. A typical scenario for those not familiar is often a company has historic lists a year+ old. The company has never sent regular emails and then something interesting happens and you want to inform people that signed up for news some time ago. These inactivity dates are absolutely useful for managing this type of situation.

I just signed up for their newsletter from a few spamtraps. I'm a nice person.

Unless you have access to those spamtraps to complete the opt-in, I doubt they will actually be subscribed.

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