A sender's domain or IP address can appear on SPAM blacklists when they send messages to email addresses — known as SPAM traps — that are no longer active or not associated with a person.
Note: Our Acceptable Use Policy requires you to only send messages to email addresses associated with people who opt-in to receive them. Our email specialists closely monitor email practices and, if necessary, can intervene to disable service for a sender if they violate this policy and disrupt delivery for others.
There are three types of traps:
Recycled SPAM traps (RST) — Include email addresses that are abandoned by recipients or retired by mailbox providers, then re-purposed to identify senders who continue to send to them.
Note: A mailbox provider can convert an abandoned or retired address into a RST after just six months. After their pre-defined period of inactivity, they turn the account off and return hard bounce errors to senders — a process known as gravestoning — for 30 to 90 days. Some of those addresses are then reactivated and used as RSTs.
Pristine SPAM traps (PST) — Include email addresses that are not associated with a person, but rather only exist to identify poor or malicious senders.
Role account (or function email account) traps — Include email addresses with webmaster@, hostmaster@, sales@, support@, postmaster@, etc.
Depending on the type of trap and the mailbox provider, the penalty for being caught in a trap varies. Sometimes, providers will simply place messages from the senders they catch in SPAM folders. Other times, they will block all messages from the IP addresses that send them. Typically, Role Account (or Functional Email Account) traps result in higher penalties.
Do you wonder why Blackbaud's email system doesn't just suppress SPAM trap addresses? We wish we could. However, to prevent malicious senders from excluding RST and PST addresses from their lists, the addresses seem legitimate. Unfortunately, we can't identify them either, so we rely on clients to manage their data and only send to engaged recipients who opt-in to receive messages.
While we don't recommend you purchase email lists — since they often contain SPAM trap addresses — we understand that sometimes you must. If so, we strongly encourage you to:
Only purchase lists from reputable sources.
Verify the last time a sender mailed to the email addresses. To reduce the likelihood that many are invalid, ensure they are less than six months old.
Send an opt-in or subscription related message to confirm recipients are interested in additional messages.