A spamtrap is an email address used to divert spammers’ attention from active business and personal communication addresses. It helps protect the integrity of primary email accounts and reduces stress on servers. However, its effectiveness in discouraging spam in general is questioned, and list poisoning can turn the trap email into a spam email address.
Also known as a spam collector or honeypot, a spamtrap is an email address that has been created with the express purpose of redirecting spammers’ efforts to that address. In theory, this process helps stop email abuse by diverting spammers’ attention away from email addresses that are in active use for business and personal communications. The effectiveness of this approach is questioned in some quarters, mainly because it is relatively easy for spammers to discover the ploy.
The general idea behind a spamtrap is to publish the address only in places where the harvesting of email addresses by spammers is likely to occur. For example, an individual who participates in paid to click sites may use the email address she throws away as and when needed to complete offers. As the lists are collected and distributed to a number of marketers, unsolicited email advertising flows directly into the spamtrap, but does not affect the email address used by the individual for general communication purposes.
The end result is that the spamtrap helps protect the integrity of the corporate or personal email address used for solicited communications. This means less opportunity for unsolicited email to find its way into your primary email account’s inbox folder. In terms of business operations, this means less stress on servers and less employee time spent wading through spam emails mixed with legitimate emails from customers or business partners.
Some have heralded the spamtrap as a means of stopping e-mail abuse. Others wonder how effective this method is in the long run. While useful for minimizing the volume of unsolicited email to the address most typically used by the end user, the method does little to discourage spam in general. Even when the spamtrap makes use of anti-spam software to block certain addresses, there is still a danger that the spammer will identify the true purpose of the email address and choose to post it to a variety of legitimate email lists. This type of list poisoning can eventually create some problems for the end user, especially if the spamtrap is tied too tightly to the identity details of the end user. The spammer can start including the spamtrap as part of the spam emails, including the address in the CC area of the message, effectively turning the trap email into a spam email address.
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