Spamtrap, Honeypot Email Addresses And How To Remove Them

A spamtrap or a honeypot email address is the one which is set up by the organizations to flag email spammers. A spamtrap is usually published in the website in such a way that it would be invisible to the regular visitors but can be accessed by the bots and the email harvesters. Spammers use automated email harvesters for collecting emails for spamming and sending other types of unsolicited emails. Now, the email harvester will grab the honeypot address and add it to their list for sending spam. Since, a spamtrap email address has never been used for signing up for receiving any newsletters and it is not visible to a human visitor, any emails which is sent to the spamtrap address is unsolicited or a spam message. All incoming messages to the spamtrap address are monitored and spammers are located with their email addresses and IP addresses of their servers. This information can be acquired from the headers in the spam messages. Then, email addresses and server addresses from which the spam was sent is flagged and added to a blacklist. Now, this blacklist will be used by the companies and email senders to automatically block an email message when it is sent from a questionable server.

How to remove spamtraps from an email list?

There is no common pattern to figure out which one is a spamtrap address. It would look like just a regular email address. However, there are ways by which you can prevent spamtrap or honeypot email addresses from ever entering your list. Make sure that you use all the ethical email marketing techniques to build your own list:

1) Never buy an email list: Do not ever buy an email list as these are not your subscribers. They are just email addresses and chances are mostly it would be full of junk and spamtraps.

2) Build your own list: You should always build your email distribution list from the scratch.

3) Use double opt-in procedure: You should always use a double opt-in form in your website or blog to collect the email addresses. A double opt-in form sends a confirmation message to the subscriber which they have to confirm before the email address is added to the list.