When you go to the doctor, do you want the doctor to treat your symptoms, or do you want the doctor to give you treatment for whatever disease is causing the symptoms?
If you’re like most people, the answer will be, “I want the doctor to treat the disease.”
In my line of work, though, the answer I get when talking with customers listed by Spamhaus or other largely spamtrap-driven lists is that they want to deal with the symptom rather than the disease.
What are the characteristics of spamtraps?
Spamtraps generally have two characteristics:
- Spamtraps accept all messages. There’s a possibility that this first commonality might have some exceptions, but they tend to be very few and far between. We’ll talk about those later, but for our purposes, you should assume that spamtraps will accept any messages sent to them.
- Spamtraps are passive. Except for the Lashback Unsubscribe Blacklist,1 spamtraps do not tend to end up on any particular entity’s list as a result of a deliberate action taken by the trap’s owner. Whether we’re talking about typo traps or email addresses scraped off of a webpage, the presence of a spamtrap does not indicate some action taken by the trap network’s owner.
The problem or the symptom?
A typical response when someone discovers that their list has spamtraps on it is to want to find and eliminate the spamtraps. The usual request is to suppress bounces and see if that fixes the problem. Unfortunately, since spamtraps receive mail, eliminating bounces will do nothing to eradicate the traps.
More than that, though, just trying to eliminate the spamtraps will do nothing to take care of the reason why the spamtraps were there to begin with. Since spamtraps tend not to enter a list because of any action taken by their owner, they should be taken as a symptom of a different, more profound problem.
Problems with acquisition or hygiene
Spamtraps tend to indicate problems with either list acquisition or list hygiene. Many spamtraps tend to appear on different lists at different times. This generally indicates that the address is being purchased through a list append, data purchase, or rental. Spamtrap operators will carefully watch for how a trap is spread and may even ask for assistance in identifying the source of the list purchase so that they can track what a vendor does with the data.
Other traps, especially typo traps and repurposed traps, are more indicative of list hygiene issues. If data is not validated during collection, the list is liable to have issues with bad data being put in and used. Additionally, old, unused lists can sit there stale long enough for the entire conditioning period mentioned in my last post to come and go without noticing and acting upon bounces.2
Conclusion
Next time, we will discuss how to handle spamtraps on a list. But, the long and short of today’s post is that people need to stop assuming that discovering and eliminating a spamtrap will solve all their problems. The presence of a spamtrap tells you that issues exist which need careful consideration and resolution.
Footnotes
- Lashback LLC, The LashBack UBL, (2016), https://web.archive.org/web/20160810043403/http://blacklist.lashback.com/ (last visited Feb 10, 2020). ↩︎
- Mickey Chandler, What Is A Spamtrap, Spamtacular (Feb. 10, 2020), https://www.spamtacular.com/2020/02/10/what-is-a-spamtrap/ (last visited Feb 24, 2020). ↩︎
