Some email addresses are dangerous. Dangerous for your reputation and the deliverability of your campaigns.
So how can you identify them, and what are the risks if you have such email addresses in your database?
3 types of dangerous email addresses for your sender reputation
Let’s take a look at 3 types of email addresses that can damage your reputation:
Hard bounces, spamtrap and spam complaints.
Hard bounces
This refers to an email address with an error, identified by a definitive error message returned by the Mailbox Service Provider.
Here’s a recap of the terms used by email professionals.
It means that the requested user does not exist, or no longer exists, due to an invalid or outdated email address. This could be a typo in the domain name, for example, or an email address that has been terminated.
If you have too many such email addresses in your database, your email service provider, such as Orange or Gmail, will know that your database is poorly maintained.
Spamtraps
A spamtrap is an email address designed to trap senders who do not comply with the law or best practices in terms of database collection and management.
There are two types of spamtraps:
- Inactive or recycled spamtrap.
These are email addresses of real people that have been deactivated. Between 6 and 12 months after deactivation, they can be reactivated as spamtrap. They are used to check the health of the sender’s database. - Active spamtrap, also known as honeypot, true trap or pristine spamtrap. This is an address specifically created to trap senders attempting to steal or collect email addresses from the web. It is not used anywhere and is posted online to detect whether senders are stealing email addresses without consent.
Spam complaints
Spam complaints are commonplace for all professionals who regularly send out email campaigns.
But complaints can represent a significant share of email marketing. Therefore, it’s important to be able to identify complainants and unsubscribe them from your databases.
A high complaint rate will have a significant negative impact on your campaigns sent to all ISPs and MSPs. Unfortunately, qualitative, well-targeted email campaigns are not always enough to avoid these types of contacts.
What to do if your email deliverability is decreasing?
If your email campaigns are less and less delivered to the inbox, despite your efforts to follow the best practices we’ve shared with you, your database may contain dangerous emails.
The only way to be sure is to use a database filtering tool. This will enable you to reduce your bounce rate, increase your deliverability and lower your complaint rate.
Which filter to choose to deal with dangerous email addresses?
At Mindbaz, we’ve implemented a filter directly into our platform.
It’s called the SafeSend filter. It enables you to filter out hard bounces, spam complaints, incorrect domains and other dangerous emails to protect your deliverability.
By building a high-quality database and improving the health of your data, you can significantly reduce deliverability concerns over the long term.
Découvrir SafeSend, le filtre contre les emails dangereux de Mindbaz