What are spam traps and blocklists?

To maintain your domain’s reputation, you need to ensure that your list does not contain blocklisted or undesirable addresses. There is a separate category of such, called spamtraps – these addresses exist solely to detect spam-related mailing traffic, and mailing to such is bound to generate major deliverability/reputational issues.

Spam traps

Spam traps are email addresses created or appropriated by ISPs (Internet Service Providers). There are multiple types of spamtraps, and each one serves a different purpose:

– Pristine spamtraps are designed to never sign up to any newsletters or lists, but are published in various places to be used as a honeypot. Their presence in your lists indicates that the list has been scraped from online repositories, and/or it was populated with bot traffic.

– Recycled spamtraps are addresses that were once legitimate, but have since become inactive, and now they serve to identify users that e-mail severely outdated lists.

– Typo spamtraps are commonly mistyped addresses, meant to identify lack of appropriate pre-screening and/or list hygiene exhibited by the sender.

Unlike spam complaints or soft bounces, spamtraps are a very accurate indicator of non-compliance, and therefore mailing just a few of them could cause your domain to be blocklisted by prominent ISPs, significantly damaging or even completely preventing the delivery of your e-mails. In more severe cases, this could even result in one of GetResponse’s mailing channels being listed, which would affect large amounts of our users.

Due to how effective spamtraps are, we cannot reveal their identity.

Blocklists

A blocklist in most cases refers to a list of domains or IP addresses that are identified as malicious or spam-related – senders included on a blocklist will usually be completely prevented from being able to deliver their messages, resulting in severe damage to sender’s reputation and deliverability metrics. These blocklists are created and maintained by ISPs, disallowing us from easily removing the listing. The domain/IP is removed from the list only after it exhibits compliant behaviour over a specific period of time, usually requiring major adjustments to e-mail marketing practices from the sender.

GetResponse also tracks undesirable addresses such as confirmed hard bounces and well-known spamtraps/honeypots in its own internal address blocklist. If your import was rejected, it means the file contained too many addresses found in that list.

Why valid email addresses end up on blocklists 

Valid email addresses can sometimes end up on a blocklist as a result of repeated hard bounces or other security measures we have in place to protect your sender reputation. 

If any of your valid addresses end up on our blocklist, contact our Customer Success Team and provide the blocked email address. We’ll check what can be done to remove such an address from the blocklist. 

How to avoid blocklists and spam traps

To prevent your domain/IP from being blocklisted, and ensure that your file does not contain spamtraps and other undesirable contacts, you can:

• Remove contacts that have been unengaged for more than 6 months.
• Monitor your bounce and complaint results.
• Verify your list with external tools before uploading it to GetResponse.
• React to unsubscribe requests sent to you directly.
• Don’t use purchased or borrowed lists.