Stay alert: In addition to invalid emails, other types may end your campaigns
Hard Bounces will destroy your email reputation as they cause blockages to providers and also to email senders. However, there are a number of other emails that, while not necessarily invalid, can undermine your campaigns and reduce their delivery rates, or even generate severe blockages.
It is important to know these emails and in this article we will show them to yo.
In this article, you will see:
- Spamtraps;
- disposable e-mails;
- Scraped emails;
- Generic Addresses;
- Emails with no engagement for a long time;
- Junk e-mails;
- System emails (transactional, system, do not respond, noreply, etc);
- Emails with blocking history
1- Spamtraps
Maybe you have never heard of spamtraps, but know that they are very harmful to your email marketing. Maybe you have some of these addresses in your home base?
In practical terms, spamtraps are actual email addresses used for the purpose of identifying and punishing spammers and destroy your email reputation.
Remember that today, spam is no longer characterized only by unsolicited messages, but also by unwelcome or excessive messages. Therefore, your base may have spamtraps addresses.
Types of Spamtraps
There are two types of spamtraps in todays email marketing landscape. Each of them have a purpose and a manner of operation. Digital marketing managers need to pay attention to both and avoid, at all costs, the existence of these addresses in their bases:
New Spamtraps
They are new email addresses, created by providers (such as Hotmail) and blacklists (such as Spamhaus) and spread across websites, forums, etc. so that they can be found by spammers through harvesting or dictionary attacks.
Harvesting is when someone uses a bot (automation software) to search the Internet, searching for email addresses on websites, blogs, forums, etc. Finding these emails, they are stored in a database.
To find out what a dictionary attack is, see below, at number 2, Scraped emails.
The interesting thing about new spamtraps is that they were created solely for this purpose, that is, they are never owned by real users and were not used to register or exchange messages. In this way, it is possible to affirm that whoever has spamtraps of this category in their email bases certainly bought lists or performed “scanning” (harvesting) in search of emails.
Note that spamtraps addresses don’t generate bounces (errors). They exist and receive emails normally. It is also important to notice that new spamtraps never perform message openings or clicks.
Also, don’t make the mistake, thinking that spamtraps addresses are easy to monitor. They are not. Nor are nonsense addresses like “[email protected]”. They pass by as addresses “without any suspicion”.
When you send an email to a spamtrap address (or hit a spamtrap), it will certainly destroy your email reputation, with a sudden drop in SenderScore points, and you also become listed in blacklists, experiencing blocks in future email marketing campaigns.
Recycled Spamtraps
You may be thinking now: “I don’t buy email bases, so I don’t have spamtraps.” The reasoning, in this case, is only “half right”. The correct thing to say is that, since you don’t buy bases, you don’t have new spamtraps. But there is a second category of spamtraps that you should be aware of: the recycled spamtraps.
In addition to combating spam, providers need to make sure you’re talking to an email address that actually has interaction (engagement), after all, emails sent to recipients who don’t read, don’t generate interaction, or display media and only occupy spaces in datacenters.
For this reason, email providers make use of recycled spamtraps: they are email addresses that used to belonged to a user, have logged in, interacted with email marekting, exchanged messages, but at some point were abandoned or closed. Then they are reactivated by the providers and monitored to know who continues to make submissions to these addresses.
By making submissions to these addresses, providers can initiate mass mailing processes for junk mail (spam folder) or even destroy your email reputation block your future email marketing campaigns.
To prevent these addresses from being part of your email bases, delete addresses that have not been engaged for more than 3-6 months
2- Scraped emails
It is a spammer technique used to construct mailing lists, using the most common names used in corporate emails, such as sales@, webmaster@, financial@, etc.
With this list of names, the spammer resorts to any and all possible domains by combining each domain with the available names. For example, imagine a [email protected]. With the list of names mentioned above, we would have, then, [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected]. See how it works?
So, with the most common names and a multitude of domains, the spammer is able to create a massive email base and even though many of the emails are invalid, it is still possible to correctly guess many addresses.
The problem is that providers monitor these addresses and many of them are considered spamtraps.
For this reason, sending to a corporate addresses whose names are very common and generic, such as sales, financial and many others, is not recommended. The ideal for corporate emails is that their recipients are people, not departments. An example, [email protected], would be an interesting email because you know exactly who the recipient is.
3- Disposable Emails
There is an email category that is used to cheat the double optin (when the recipient needs to confirm the registration through an activation link in an email).
These emails are known by several names, such as disposable or temporary.
Its main characteristic is its transitional, perishable character. In other words, these emails only work for a few minutes or hours. They serve to enable the user to perform a registration with confirmation without, however, needing to register their personal email.
For those who received the registration, everything seems normal, since the registration was confirmed through a link sent by an email that was properly activated.
The problem is that after a few minutes or hours, the email becomes invalid and therefore generates a bounce for the sender. And, as you already know, invalid emails generate blockages, don’t they?
4- Generic adresses
Very similar to scraped emails, generic addresses are actually those emails whose recipients are not people but generic entities. For example, instead of an email [email protected], you would have an email as [email protected].
Although the possibility of problems here is infinitely less, it is important that you monitor your subscriptions because these emails are often opened by different people over time. Today, Claudia is the one who takes care of the email. Tomorrow Claudia may be able to go to another company and the email will be taken over by José, who has not signed up to receive his emails and therefore doesn’t know of their existence. Upon receiving a new email, Jose may report it as spam.
5- Emails without engagement
You have seen that emails that have gone long periods without engagement can become recycled spamtraps. And that should be problem enough for you to seriously consider removing emails with more than 3 (up to 6) months without interaction.
But while the number of emails that are converted to recycled spamtraps are actually small compared to the total number of non-engaging emails in your campaigns, there’s another strong reason for you to remove these emails from your base: deliverability.
One of the key factors that providers take into consideration in their algorithms for sending their emails to the inbox or to the spam box is the total amount of engagements (openings) their campaigns have.
If you have a large number of recipients who never open your emails, your engagement is goin to be harmed. As a result of this, most of your emails will run the risk of being sent to the spam box and destroy your email reputation.
The math is simple. Imagine two scenarios, A and B, with the same number of openings(100). Its total base has 224 non-engaging emails in a total of 1000 emails. Campaign A sent all emails. Campaign B removed these 224 emails before sending. With some simple math, campaign A had 10% engagement (100 in 1,000). Campaign B, 12.89% (100 in 776 – because 224 non-engaging emails were removed).
6- Junk emails
There are some emails that can also destroy your email reputation for various reasons and for this, we recommend that you seek to remove them from your bases.
Numeral sequences
There are several emails that are just numeric sequences, such as [email protected]. Is it possible that these are emails from real users? Of course. However, they may only be secondary repositories used only to receive “uninteresting” emails. Therefore, the engagement will be very low or none.
Many of these emails also serve the banking system. Since the rules for using emails in this market are very severe, rarely will these emails receive your messages (because of their strong antispam filters) or they will be ignored
Curse words
Many people often make email entries that use slang words or profanity, in addition to sexual terms. If possible, remove all these emails from your base.
Since the antispam systems have word filters, when your emails are delivered, they can trigger blocking mechanisms and destroy your email reputation.
7- System Emails
With the growth of e-commerce, transactional emails have become very common. It is not difficult to receive emails such as “[email protected]”, “[email protected]”, among others.
Because these emails belong to automated shipping systems, in most cases there will be no one to respond or interact with these messages
8- Emails with blocking history
This is another type of email that needs to be scrutinized. They aren’t invalid emails but have a history of previous blockages.
Many email marketing tools nowadays now classify these emails as hard bounces, such as MailChimp, RD Station, among many others, as you can see in this article, where we give more Details
This is why we must always be aware that those emails can destroy your email reputation.
How to prevent these emails from being in your databases
In a perfect world you remove 100% of problematic emails from your submissions so that you have an excellent reputation and the minimum number of problems generated by base management. That will prevent invalid emails that can destroy your email reputation.
Each type of email has a solution. Let’s separate the solutions into two types:
- Validation and Verification of Bases: in this case, a tool such as SafetyMails can identify and remove a huge portion of emails that will potentially destroy your email reputation. They are:
- Invalid
- Spamtraps
- Scraped emails
- Disposable
- Junk
- Local Analysis: here you will need to cross-reference your historical submission data and your local email database data:
- Generic Addresses
- Emails without engagement for a long time
- System e-mails
- Emails with blocking history
If you would like to validate and verify your email bases, we recommend using SafetyMails, one of Brazil’s most innovative Startups MarTechs, according to Insights League. Open a free account and receive 100 free credits for testing
Why is it important to implement an email verification service in your strategy?
When you build an email database, you surely want to these emails that can destroy your email reputation to connect with your lists.
However, many people give a fake email address or an invalid one. They can simply make silly spelling mistakes during the registration process in your landing page or newsletters, for example.
SafetyMails has an expertise in prevent your whole strategy went to waste because you ended up with several addresses that are not fit to use. In other words, using our email verifier, your collected addresses are real, and can generate engagement.
In case of typos, the service can solicit corrections and reviews, making sure you don’t lose a promising lead. Everything happens in real-time and the email checker api is accurate and fast.
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