As an email marketer, it’s essential to be aware of different factors and traps that can negatively affect your —one of them is being caught in honeypot email addresses.
While they act as legitimate email addresses, sending an uk email list 19 millions contact leads email to a honeypot address will likely damage your reputation with internet service providers (ISPs), making your email marketing efforts futile.
This guide will go in-depth on honeypot email addresses, how they can get into your email list, and the difference between spam traps and honeypot addresses. We’ll also go through how they can affect legitimate email senders and tips on avoiding honeypot emails.
Read on to know more.
What is an Email Honeypot?
Email honeypots are anti-spam traps that catch spammers or senders with poor contact management practices. Similar to real-life honeypots that lure animals, email honeypots are configure by ISPs and email service providers as legitimate email addresses to identify spammers and place them on their blacklists.
Besides catching malicious actors, honeypot email addresses usually catch senders with poor email list management and marketers actively using a bought mailing list for their email campaigns.
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Honeypots can also target bots that input fake email addresses into an email address collection form, hackers that harvest email addresses from web pages and subdomains, and ones that collect personal information like phone numbers and bank information.
Six Common Types of Honeypot Emails
To effectively catch spammers, honeypot emails come in different forms depending on their use case. Here are six types of honeypot addresses that you might encounter online:
- Email Honeypots: These are dummy or inactive email addresses use to receive malicious messages from spammers. Cybersecurity teams collect these suspicious emails for production and research purposes. While production honeypots are use to check vulnerabilities on a network, research honeypots are use by government agencies to reveal a spammer’s methods and tactics.
- High-Interaction Honeypots: These are complex honeypot systems that waste a spammer’s time so the cybersecurity team can analyze their acts and check vulnerabilities within the network.
- Low-Interaction Honeypots – These honeypot addresses are the least complex and give an attacker limit access to your decoy operating system (OS). It emulates a small amount of internet protocols and network services—usually Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP)—just enough to deceive the attacker.
- Spam Honeypots: Spam honeypots trap spammers using fake data that appear valuable for their acts. These can also trap legitimate email senders with poor list management and bad sending practices. Use our Email Spam Checker to learn your spam score and what it takes to avoid the spam folder.
- Database Honeypots: As a part of protecting databases, these honeypot traps are use to attract attacks and catch hackers with decoy databases.
- Client Honeypots: A client or server honeypot is use to lure suspicious servers that hackers utilize when attacking other servers. Cybersecurity teams use this to watch how a hacker modifies the client during an attack.
What are the Risks of Getting Caught in a Honeypot Trap?
If you’re a business owner or an email marketer, the risks of getting caught on spam traps and honeypot email addresses are real. One of the biggest issues when you accidentally send emails to these addresses is being identifie as a spammer. This will put your sender’s reputation at risk, leading to low email deliverability on your marketing emails or getting blacklisted on various mailbox service providers.
Your domain can also be affect if you apply unsafe email collection practices. Overall, getting caught in honeypot addresses can cause massive damage to your email marketing campaigns by damaging your sender reputation, resulting in your emails not reaching their intended recipients or landing them in spam.
What is the Difference Between Spam Traps and Honeypot Email Addresses?
While both terms are use interchangeably nowadays, spam traps and honeypot email addresses have distinct differences:
Spam Trap
A spam trap is an invalid or fake email address repurpose by an ISP or email service provider to catch spammers and what will be key in customer service in the near future? legitimate senders with poor sending methods. Unlike honeypot emails, spam trap addresses are easy to detect using email list cleaning software and deliverability tools. ISPs also redeploy old email addresses as spam traps and closely monitor their activity for unsolicit emails.
To learn more, you can read our guide on checking if an email address is still active and valid.
Email Honeypot
Email honeypots are email addresses creat by ISPs and anti-spam platforms to bait spammers. Sending one of these emails will almost always label you as a spammer and will get your address blocke by mailbox providers. Honeypots can be plac on company web pages to lure out individuals who use email scraping tools and block those who send them.
Compar to a spam trap, honeypot addresses don’t have to exist and have a dedicat mailbox; trappers can check their activity for attempt email sends and identify those email senders. Email honeypots are also relatively complex to detect, and any legitimate email sender can be trapp in one, greatly affecting their sender reputation.
How a Honeypot Email Address Can Get Into Your Mailing List
Here are two main ways that a honeypot email address can find its way to your mailing lists:
Using Web Scraping Tools
Web scrapers use bots to crawl websites and extract data for lead generation, email scraping, market research, and other relat tasks. While scraping email addresses may seem efficient, it’s a bad idea since it directly puts you at risk of acquiring honeypot emails. Once you’ve sent emails to these addresses without consent, there’s a high chance of getting your emails mark as spam or blacklist by ISPs.
Purchasing Email Lists
Purchas lists are always a bad idea for email marketing since they rarely assure you that emails in the list have consent to receiving marketing content, automatically violating GDPR compliance policies. Because these email addresses are random and likely don’t involve your target audience, you’ll have low email deliverability and mobile list on your marketing emails. They can also contain email honeypots, which will damage your sender’s reputation.
Valid email lists are hard to come by and are usually not for sale, so it’s still practical to acquire a legitimate subscriber organically through single or double opt-ins.
4 Tips to Avoid Honeypot Email Addresses
Now that you know everything about honeypots and how they can potentially disrupt your email marketing efforts, here are four effective tips so you can avoid them:
