Spam Traps, Spam Trigger words and Anti-Spam laws one simply can’t seem to get enough of them. If you are in the business of email marketing, then you must be well familiar with the aforementioned obstacles to efficient email marketing. When we think of it now, creating email copies which are cleared by all spam filters has manifested itself into an art rather than a science. The key again as to every art is relativity!

Email providers are openly fighting a war against spammers who try to manipulate gullible people and rightly so. But the downside is that in crossfire, genuine email marketers like us take the blow. Of all the emails sent by genuine marketers and non-spammers only 79% actually land in the inboxes of your subscribers. Reason for such low delivery rates one may ask, answer to which is that even a small error in the email body or as the professional jargon is “spam-like content”, will lead your email directly into spam folders.

The internet threat is real which is the reason for such email providers being so paranoid about prospective spam. Almost every major internet country has some type of legislation that acts against unsolicited bulk email. USA’s CAN-SPAM Act of 2004 and Canada’s CASL of 2014 are one of the most prominent regulatory texts referred to around the world by businesses and marketers.

SPAM Traps

Spam Traps are the first resort used by internet and email providers to tackle spammers. Spam traps are basically honeypot email addresses which are used to attract spams. When a spam comes they identify it and its IP address and the domain from which it was sent to is blocked indefinitely. This annihilates the sender reputation and it could take as much as a year to get it back up. Along with fresh honeypot addresses, email providers also use discarded old emails as traps. These emails are very likely to be subject to spam and that’s where ESPs (Email service Providers) have a voila moment! With minimal resources and old addresses they just catched a spammer.

SPAM Filters

Next are Spam filters. If by any way, a spam email is able to tackle all the traps and progress on to the next stage of email delivery, ESP’s employ Spam filters. These are automated systems which critically scrutinize the contents of every email right from the amount of provocative words used, the grammar errors to something as minute as the image-to-text ratio. Such filters employ sophisticated machine learning systems to keep themselves updated with the terms that have always been created in the contemporary language. They make sure to an almost perfect certainty that a poorly constructed and written email will never reach the inbox it intends to. If the Spam filter approves then Well done! You’ve reached the inbox of your customer but if the filter finds suspicion then Good luck reaching the inbox of any subscriber!

This was an overview about Spam Filters and Spam Traps. Have any more doubts or figure we missed something? Reach us at ashley@adcrux.io and we’d be happy to help.