What is a Honeypot Email Trap?
A honeypot email trap is a fictitious email address set up by email service providers (ESPs), internet service providers (ISPs), or anti-spam organizations to catch and identify senders of unsolicited or spam emails. These email addresses are hidden from the general public and are not used for any legitimate communication. Instead, they serve as bait to catch senders who harvest email addresses from websites or databases without permission.
In the ever-evolving landscape of email marketing, there are numerous challenges that businesses and marketers must contend with to ensure their messages reach the right audience. One such challenge is the presence of honeypot email traps, which can wreak havoc on your email marketing campaigns if not handled with care. In this post, we’ll dive into what honeypot email traps are, why they exist, and most importantly, how to avoid falling into them.
The word “honeypot” can be quite deceptive: it has nothing to do with honey or bees. Email honeypots are traps created to fight spammers or senders with poor contact management practices. Spam traps are generally used by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and by other organizations such as those setting up blacklists.
In concrete terms, a honeypot is an email address that looks like a legitimate email address but is not used by a real user. As a result, we can assume that users that send emails to these addresses are either spammers, simply didn’t clean their list of contacts or, which is worse, bought their email lists. Overall, email honeypot is a good solution for fighting spambots.
Honeypot email vs. Spam trap — are they the same?
The terms honeypot and spam trap are often used as synonyms. They are close but not quite the same.
Spam traps
Imagine email addresses that were once real legitimate and active. They were then blocked by ISPs or email services following a long period of inactivity. If you try to send an email to these addresses you most probably will receive an error message that can be classified as a soft bounce. Unfortunately, some of these addresses can be reactivated as spam traps. Spam traps are quite easy to determine compared to honeypots. After a clean-up of your lists, simply remove the risky addresses.
Honeypot email
These email addresses were designed by ISPs, or (more typically) anti-spam services such as Spamhaus specifically to trap spammers. By using one of these emails, you will immediately be considered a spammer because there’s no way you could’ve got them legitimately. You no longer be able to send emails, your IP and domain name will be blocked by the ISPs. It will be very complicated to prove your good intentions after being caught and you may be blacklisted forever.
The problem with honeypots is how to identify them. You have no guarantees that you will never fall into this trap even if you have never spammed. Although it sounds very intimidating, don’t get spooked! We will explain below how email honeypots appear on email lists and provide tips on how to fight against them.
How honeypot email addresses get on to email lists
There are several ways honeypots can sneak into your email lists:
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Purchased email lists
Buying email lists is always a bad idea.
First, you are explicitly violating GDPR compliance that states that you must get consent from a user to be allowed to send them emails. This is possible only when a user opts in personally to subscribe to your emails.
Secondly, when you buy a list, the contacts are almost certainly not from your target audience, it’s usually a random group of people. And a cherry on the top is that bought lists frequently contain honeypots or other “shady” email addresses that can get you penalized by ISP and anti-spam services and ruin your reputation.
Email lists of high quality are never sold. If it’s up for sale, that indicates that the email addresses have previously been rejected as inactive or unsuitable for outreach marketing. Instead, use more “healthy” tricks to build your email lists.
Again, by purchasing lists you are choosing the wrong path to attract your audience which will almost always result in a ruined sender reputation or a company-wide blocklist.
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Software that scrapes email addresses
This sort of software “crawls” webpages for email addresses and then collects the stolen addresses into a mailing list. This approach looks like a cheap and quick way to grow your email list, but it may be detrimental to your business and is not an efficient or even a legal way to establish a quality prospect database. You can get hundreds of addresses using this approach, but you won’t get the most important thing: authorization.
You should be well aware of the risks linked to email scraping as it is illegal in some countries, let alone being bad for business. There are a lot of compliance regulations that penalize email scraping: GDPR for Europe, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) in the United States, Spam Act in Australia and Anti-Spam Law (CASL) in Canada.
Why Do Honeypot Email Traps Exist?
- Spam Prevention: The primary purpose of honeypot email traps is to detect and prevent spam. By monitoring email addresses that receive messages without having opted in, ESPs and ISPs can identify senders who are engaging in unsolicited email practices.
- Maintaining Email Reputation: ESPs are motivated to maintain a high email sender reputation. Sending emails to honeypot traps can harm this reputation and result in emails from a sender being marked as spam or blacklisted.
How to Avoid Honeypot Email Traps:
- Use Permission-Based Lists: The golden rule of email marketing is to only send emails to individuals who have explicitly opted in to receive communications from you. Avoid purchasing or scraping email lists, as these often contain honeypot addresses.
- Maintain Clean Lists: Regularly clean your email lists to remove inactive or outdated addresses. Honeypot addresses are more likely to be found in old, inactive lists.
- Authenticate Your Emails: Implement authentication protocols like SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) to verify the legitimacy of your emails.
- Monitor Engagement: Pay attention to open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates. If your emails consistently receive low engagement, it could trigger suspicions and lead to your emails being flagged.
- Segment Your Lists: Tailor your emails to specific segments of your audience. This not only improves engagement but also reduces the chances of sending irrelevant messages to honeypot traps.
- Use Double Opt-In: Implement a double opt-in process, where subscribers must confirm their email addresses by clicking a link in a confirmation email. This ensures that the email addresses you collect are valid and owned by real individuals.
- Educate Your Team: Ensure that your marketing team understands the importance of avoiding honeypot email traps and follows best practices in email marketing.
The final thoughts about honeypot email:
Honeypots can be a big challenge for your email campaigns but you can mitigate the risks of falling into this trap by taking the following measures:
- Never buy email lists. Remember that the shortest and quickest solutions are usually riskier and less effective in the long run.
- Monitor your email deliverability. Hard bounces can be an alert on becoming honeypot-trapped.
- Use double opt-ins. It’s always better to be safe than sorry afterwards. Double opt-ins effectively defend against incorrect email addresses, and bots or spam.
- Maintain list hygiene. Keep your email listing updated and get rid of “junk” addresses once in a while.
