Sugardaddie.com: Welcoming a 10-Year-Old Spamtrap
Sugardaddie.com, a dating web site that describes its target market as “successful, attractive, ambitious, confident and experienced” people, is sending bulk email advertisements to an email address that was closed in 2002, ten years ago. The ESP is Pure 360, aka PureSender, which has a poor reputation with the Web-O-Trust but has not been sending any great volumes of spam to my spamtraps.
Judging from the age of the Sugardaddie.com domain, the spamtrap email address was closed at about the same time that this domain was registered. That would have been months or perhaps a year or more before the Sugardaddie.com web site first opened. Sugardaddie.com only started spamming this email address last week. Normally I would draw no conclusions from a single spam to a spamtrap that was or might have been a real email address at one time. This spamtrap is unlikely to have been created by a simple typo in a web form, however, and is also too old to have been legitimately subscribed to the Sugardaddie.com service. Given these facts, I strongly suspect a purchased list.
Sending IP: 83.137.133.162
Spam Sample:
Actual Headers:
Received: from mta162.pur3.net (mta162.pur3.net [83.137.133.162])
by <xxx> (Postfix) with ESMTP id <xxx>
for <xxx>; Fri, 3 Feb 2012 12:xx:xx -0600 (CST)
DKIM-Signature: <xxx>
Received: from localhost (127.0.0.1) by mta162.pur3.net id <xxx>
for <xxx>; Fri, 3 Feb 2012 18:xx:xx +0000
(envelope-from <xxx>)
Subject: Newest Members To Join Sugardaddie.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html; charset="ISO-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
From: "Sugardaddie.com" <news@sugardaddiemail.com>
Reply-To: "Sugardaddie.com" <news@sugardaddiemail.com>
X-MailId: <xxx>
To: <xxx>
Date: Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:xx:xx +0000
Message-ID: <<xxx>@mta162.pur3.net>
Readable Email:
From: Sugardaddie.com <news@sugardaddiemail.com>
To: <spamtrap>
Subject: Newest Members To Join Sugardaddie.com
Reply-To: Sugardaddie.com <news@sugardaddiemail.com>
Hello <xxx>,
We thought you would like to know when new members join Sugardaddie.com
<removed>
We are contacting you as someone who has registered with our site as a member.
If you no longer wish to be contacted from our site, <a href=”http://sugardaddiemail.com/_act/link.php?<xxx>>Click Here</a>.
I’m leaving a comment because I had been a member of Sugardaddie for several years and never had a problem with spam from them. I was an inactive member for about 2 years and I received my first email from them, which was the same as above. It was showing me the newest members of this site. In the email it stated I was being contacted as someone that had registered with and they supplied a link to stop any further notices. I had forgotten all about my account and I did have an active account with them still. I logged in and deactivated my account and I NEVER heard from them again. I’m writing this comment because I was a very satisfied member of Sugardaddie.com and I hate to see reputable websites receive unfair press. If the above poster received an email from this site, they must have an account they forgot about. Also, the poster of this site clearly shows a link supplied by Sugardaddie.com to stop any further email notices. I wonder if the poster actually tried using that link before making assumptions.
This report involved spam to an email address that hasn’t been live for over ten years. Since the domain sugardaddie.com was only registered in 2002, that would seem to indicate that it is highly unlikely that the previous owner of the email address would have signed up for anything. (Do you know the difference between an active email address and a spamtrap? Perhaps that’s where the apparent disconnect between what you said and what I reported comes from.)
I accept that you (and probably others) had a good experience on this web site. That unfortunately does not mean that the owners of the web site have good email practices, or that they are not spamming. This whole blog illustrates the problem of otherwise legitimate companies that spam.
Perhaps I am a bit naive or ignorant of certain matters on the internet. But if an email address is not live, how can you receive an email, spam or otherwise? I’m not trying to a smart ass, I’m really trying to understand because I have never had any problems with the site. Also, I am quite sure if you take the email address and sent it to Sugardaddie they can give you the info for the account associated with the email. They did that for me once when I forgot my password.
Ah, you’re new to the antispam world. 🙂 Let me explain spamtraps. (I should probably include this in the FAQ.)
An email address is not “live” when it doesn’t belong to a real person or role, and should not receive email. There are several kinds of spamtraps. Some are email addresses that never existed at all, email addresses that were created and hidden in various places on the internet where legitimate users wouldn’t find them, but spammers would, and email addresses that at one time belonged to real people but that have been closed for a long time and properly managed so that legitimate bulk email is no longer sent to them.
The spamtrap that received the SugarDaddie.com notice was of the last type. Prior to the second half of 2002, it belonged to a real person. That person left the company in question, and the email address was closed.
Current best practices indicate that an email address that was once live must be completely disabled for a period of at least six months before it can be turned into a spamtrap. This is done so that legitimate senders of bulk email will see the bounces and remove the email addresses from their lists. I don’t personally believe that six months is long enough: I disable any email address that ever belonged to a real person for at least twelve months before I turn it into a spamtrap. This particular email address was disabled for over three years.
After that period (which I call a “timeout”), the email address is then re-enabled and directed to a spamtrap collector. At that point, no legitimate bulk email should be sent to it.
I just responded to a representative from SugarDaddie.com about this blog, and discussed the two ways that I believe this could have happened if they do not use third-party lists. Given your own experience — you were contacted after an extended period when you had not used your account or been contacted by this sender — I think it might be possible that this was a VERY old email address on their system that they simply didn’t realize was no longer valid. Most senders of bulk email know better than to contact an email address that has been uncontacted for more than a year. It appears that SugarDaddie.com might not have realized the problems that this can cause.
Email like that is still spam — it’s unsolicited bulk email. But senders that make an honest mistake aren’t spammers as that word is usually used because they didn’t intend to spam. If that’s the case, I hope that SugarDaddie.com fixes their process and cleans up their list, and that will be the end of this.
To Catherine Jefferson, normally I would not post on a blog, but I find it very disturbing to be accused of something that is not true. I am with upper management in Sugardaddie.com and I can say with complete honesty that we do not SPAM members, nor do we buy outside email lists or share any of our members’ information with outside sources. Emails that we send out are to fully registered members that have agreed to accept email notices from us. To stop any further notifications all messages have an opt out link included which requires only one click by the recipient (as shown in the email sample you posted on this blog). We do not send messages to anyone that has cancelled their account or requested to be taken off of our mailing list and we do not use any unethical mailing practices. The email notice you received from us must be associated with a registered account on our site. Though you may state that this is an email spamtrap, someone with this email used it to register with our site. Outside of someone submitting this information we would have no knowledge of its existence. We beleive that you posted your comments about us in good faith, but they are not true. We have an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau and pride ourselves on the fact that we are 100% legitimate and have run a successful business for ten years using only ethical business practices. We would like the opportunity to prove we are ligitimate so that you retract this blog and not unjustly tarnish our good name.
Sincerely,
Steven Pasternack
Sugardaddie.com
Steven — an email from SugarDaddie.com hit one of my spamtraps. That might be unwanted news, and I’m glad it is unwanted, but that’s what happened. I stated that truthfully. There’s nothing to retract. If you don’t purchase lists or obtain non-opted-in email addresses, then *something* caused an email address that has not belonged to a real person for a decade to appear on your list. The sensible thing at this point is to figure out what happened and to fix it.
First, does your service confirm subscriptions before you create the account? What I mean is, do you send a confirmation email to the email address that is listed on your site and require that the recipient respond to that confirmation email before the account is created? Normally, a recipient replies to a confirmation email either by responding directly to the email, or by clicking a confirmation link. If you don’t do this, then any typoed email address will be accepted by your system.
A second possibility is that this is a very old account that has not been accessed for the past decade. The spamtrap email address that you hit was closed in 2002. The Whois database indicates that the domain sugardaddie.com was created in April 2002. When did the SugarDaddie.com web site go live? How old is your oldest account? If your site has been in business since 2002, and you have email addresses that you have not contacted in over a year, it is highly likely that quite a few of them no longer belong to the people who signed up for your service. Reactivating an email address that is over a year old (as you apparently did, judging from an earlier response to this blog) is asking for trouble because so many of those email addresses will be closed, will bounce, or (worst) will have become spamtraps.
I know that a great deal of spam is sent unintentionally, not by a company or individual that intends to spam. Part of the purpose of this blog is to make it clear to the world just how much of that unintentional spam is sent, so that companies that have been unaware of or ignoring the problem will fix it. Resurrecting fallow email addresses (email addresses that have been uncontacted for over a year) is one way that this happens. Not confirming subscriptions is another. I’d suggest that you look at how you are managing your email list to fix the problem.
Hello Catherine. Thank you for your response. In answer to your questions, our site went live in 2002 and we still have active members that go back to that time. We do have a confirmation system in which an email address is verified by clicking on an activation link that is within the email we send to the address submitted to our database. Without clicking this link a person cannot go any further into our site and cannot create a personalized profile. Without a profile you cannot interact with other members. Many members have come and gone with us over the years and we do not want to terminate accounts that may have been simply put aside for awhile. We have recently been sending reminder emails of various forms to people that still have open accounts with us so that they will either use the account or close it. Included in ALL emails is an opt out link that requires only one click. The emails that we send are to people who verified their email address and then logged back into sugardaddie.com to create a public profile. Without verification and a public profile you could not have received an email from us. The email you received would not have been sent if there was not an open account on our site. Therefore, there is still an open account on Sugardaddie.com that someone created using the email in question. The email that was sent to your spamtrap was sent in good faith, believing that it belonged to an actual member. That is why I am requesting that you retract this article about us because it gives the impression that we are purposely using unethical emailing practices which we are not. Also, if you would be kind enough to inform us of the email in question, we may then cancel the account associated with it so we do not unintentionally set off anymore spam traps.
Thank you for being open to our situation.
Sincerely,
Steven Pasternack
Sugardaddie.com
Mr Pasternack, please have a look at this earlier post of mine on the blog. The problem of not removing outdated and erroneous addresses is huge, and from having read this conversation, I think you just might be participating in it. Not on my spamtraps, perhaps, but in general.
Okay, then it appears that we know what happened. You started mailing email addresses that have not been contacted for years. You need to quit doing that. I don’t see *any* indication that you realize that this was a mistake or plan to quit doing it. Why not?
I believe that your intentions are good and what you are doing is a positive force for all internet users, but it is not right to tell us not to send messages to email addresses that are a few years old and have never requested to be taken off our mailing list. There is no law that prohibits companies from contacting a legitimate customer in their database after a certain amount of years. It is a common and worldwide practice for companies to send some form of a reminder message to a former customer or client whether it is through regular mail, telephone or email. Sugardaddie.com was sending emails to accounts that were legitimately registered on the site. We do not practice unethical mailing practices. Is it our fault that an email bacame inactive over time and then became a spam trap? As far as we know, we sent a message to a legitimate address. Unless you supply us with the name of the account or click the opt out link supplied in the email (which is shown in your post above) it is very possible you will receive another email from us in the future, no fault of ours. I truly know that you are trying to do good for the internet and I applaud your efforts. But please recongnize that one of your spam traps has unintentionally caught a legitimate business. Your blog is a service to all internet users, but please make examples of the companies and people that are intentionally doing wrong, not the companies that are accidentally caught in your traps and trying to conduct business in an ethical and proper manner.
Sincerely,
Steven Pasternack
Mr Pasternack, I’d like to address this piece by piece.
> it is not right to tell us not to send messages to email addresses
> that are a few years old and have never requested to be taken off
> our mailing list.
Did you read my earlier blog post? I’ve recently come into a very large bunch of these that have been inactive for a looooong time.
If you mailed your contacts regularly in the meantime, you should have noticed the bounces and acted upon them.
If you didn’t, you’re deliberately taking your chances because people stop using email addresses, people die, domain names expire, businesses abandon trade names, businesses go bankrupt and so on – there are very many reasons for why an email address you thought belonged to somebody back in 2000 (or even 2010) no longer does.
> There is no law that prohibits companies from contacting a
> legitimate customer in their database after a certain amount
> of years.
It only takes one example to the contrary, doesn’t it? The European data protection directive 95/46/EC forbids the processing of outdated and erroneous personal data. It’s in Chapter II, Section I (Principles relating to data quality), Article 6, Paragraph 1(d). I recognise you’re probably talking about the United States, but you didn’t specify any particular jurisdiction.
Your opinion isn’t shared by *anybody* I know of in the bulk email world, Mr. Pasternack. I consider that starting up email to email addresses that you hadn’t contacted for years and had *no* reason to believe were still active was both foolish and irresponsible, and I do not hesitate to say so. The email address that you sent email to here has not been live for *TEN YEARS*. It was disabled and bounced all email for *THREE YEARS* in the interim. That email address should not be receiving bulk email — not from you or anybody else. I probably would not have complained if you’d done a reconfirmation, although most bulk email professionals recommend against that for email addresses that have not been contacted in the past year. But just to start sending bulk email to an email address that you had not contacted for ten years? Given an email address churn rate over that period that is certainly over 90%? That’s *nuts*.
Please do some research — talk with professionals in the field of bulk email, read blogs, etc. — so that you’re not just taking my word for it.
We can go back and forth and discuss law provisions of international jurisdiction, but the bottom line is that we are using the email supplied by the customer so that we may remind him of the service we provide. If that is not the case the receipiant of the email will suffer at most a minor inconvenince of an attempt to attract his business again which is not illegal.
We understand that you are trying to do what is right, but you reported us under a false msconception of what you believed to be right. Here are the reasons why.
1- Though the email in question may not have been in use for ten years, at one point it was active and it was used to create a legitimate account with us before it became inactive.
2- The email address in question became inactive shortly after registration for whatever reason, it does not mean that the owner of the account was inactive for ten years. It is quite possible he is still using our services, logging in from time to time over the years. We have thousands of members that leave us for several years at a time and come back again to use our service at a later date.
3- We do not send emails based upon the date an email address was verified to create an account. We base it upon the last date a person logs into our site which shows his most recent activity.
4 – For a member to be active and log into our site, it is NOT necessary to have an active email account. The email account is initially used for verification purposes, afterwards a member may log in with just his username and password.
5- In theory, a person may have registered with us ten years ago, the email account became inactive for several years, yet he is still an active member using his password to log in every few years or however often he feels like.
6- Because we are seeing an active account on our end, we would then send emails to this account based upon the activity. Being that YOU took over the email account and reactivated it as a spamtrap it would not bounce any emails sent to it. Therefore you are now receiving this person’s email and assumed it was spam because the original person did not use this address for so long. It is also very possible that you unintentionally clicked on one of the links in the email that was intended for our member and by doing so you logged into our site and this person’s account, initiating more notices from us. As far as we are concerned, we see an account that is being logged into and an email address that appears active because you reactivated it.
We hope you understand our explanation of recent events and see fit to withdraw you complaint against us and retract this blog. At the very least, please supply us with the email address that is in question so that we may contact the original owner to inform him that he needs to change his contact infomation with us and for other obvious security issues.
Sincerely,
Steven Pasternack
I just happen to think EU (specifically, UK) legislation is most fitting. Why?
Received: from mta162.pur3.net (mta162.pur3.net [83.137.133.162])
by (Postfix) with ESMTP id
for ; Fri, 3 Feb 2012 12:xx:xx -0600 (CST)
[whois.ripe.net] <– European IP address registry
inetnum: 83.137.133.160 – 83.137.133.167
netname: pur3-ukex-020
descr: IP's allocated to specific customers in Asia
country: GB
OK, which part of Asia is pur3.net in?
[whois.joker.com]
domain: pur3.net
owner: DNS Administrator
organization: Purepromoter Ltd
email: dnsadmin@pure360.com
address: Units A-D, Level 7 South
address: New England House
city: Brighton
state: East Sussex
postal-code: BN1 4GH
country: GB <— Oh, THAT part of Asia.
phone: +44.8707657222
fax: +44.8707657227
(The fact that the beneficiary thinks it necessary to use the services of Domains By Proxy is telling as well.)
Catherine, I hope you read my last post in which I need the email address in question so that the original owner of it doesn’t trigger it again by accessing his account on my website.
Thank you,
Steven Pasternack
I just got back to checking comments. Unfortunately I can’t give you the email address. It’s a spamtrap. It’s very much against the rules (mine and everyone else’s) to divulge the identity of a spamtrap except in response to a court order or an actual emergency. I’ve discussed the reasons why to exhaustion elsewhere in the blog, but this both prevents malicious activity against senders of bulk email and listwashing (removal of email addresses that complain without doing anything to fix the actual problem).
Thank you for your reply. We are truly trying to do something about this. We are NOT sending emails to accounts that have been INACTIVE for ten years, we are sending emails to accounts that have shown RECENT ACTIVITY and have triggered a response which is sending an email to an outdated email address which can be many years old. In this case an email address that has been reactivated as a spam trap. Sometimes accounts remain dormant for a number of years and then become active again. This appears to be the situation here.
We understand why you would not want to reveal the email address in question and therefore prevent real spammers from being caught. But we hope you would not report us again for spamming if we are caught in the same or similar trap.
In some of the best laid traps it is possible to accidentally catch an innocent person.
Do you think it is possible to supply us with the member name of the person we sent the email to? It would be at the top of the message which you replaced in your blog with three “x’s”. This would allow us to contact the person on our site and tell him he needs to update his email account.
Thank you,
Steven Pasternack
I’ve seen several other such cases, when companies made the mistake of assuming that because an account is active, the information associated with that account remains valid. If you ask anybody who works in database marketing, they’ll tell you otherwise. This doesn’t just apply to email addresses: it’s equally true of postal addresses and phone numbers.
The big difference is that, if you send bulk mail to an old or invalid postal address, it’s just dumped. Phone numbers are riskier if you do telemarketing; you have to do regular checks of the Do Not Call list and there are special rules for calling cell phones as opposed to land lines. I understand that many companies no longer do telemarketing because of this.
Unfortunately the word isn’t out — yet — about email addresses. Companies often make the mistake of assuming that, because an account is active, the email address is also active. Unless you are receiving communications *from your customer* from that email address, however, or the customer is responding to email-only offers, you don’t know whether the address continues to be valid after you confirm it. In your case, you appear to have fallow (inactive) accounts with years-old email addresses that you are suddenly contacting. (See the comment above by an old user of yours who received an email from you after a couple of years of silence.) You might also have active accounts with old/closed email addresses.
I don’t know whether you track activity that shows a customer is both receiving and responding to your email or not. Even if you do, however, you’ve clearly got a significant number of email addresses that might still belong to their original owners, but that might also be closed, disabled, and (worst) part of somebody’s collection of spamtraps. I’m the least of your worries. It’s the larger ISPs, the reputation services, and the blacklists that should have you worried. If they get hits on the same kinds of spamtraps that I did, they’ll do more than blog about it.
To fix this, you really need to repermission your email addresses. After that, you need to set up a system that repermissions any email address that you have not heard from within the past year, even if the user is still actively accessing his or her account. Otherwise you are looking for trouble.
Thank you for the reply. This will be my last response.
We are fully aware of proper and ethical email sending procedures and protocals. As stated earlier we have an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau which should be an indication that we do hold proper business and ethical standards to the highest level. Our email practices are no different.
In this particular instance we have one email that has fallen through the cracks of the system and has been caught in your trap because you reactivated a once legitimate email address. We are not seeing any indication of a bad address or hard bounce and we never will because you have set a trap which does not give us a proper response. We would love to remove this address from our opted in mailing list, but it is impossible because the address is being kept a secret from us. Meanwhile, emails may continue to be sent to this address that belong to a member of our site and pertinent information that he or she may find of interest is purposely being withheld.
If a person changes their place of residence it is highly possible to receive mail from the postal service that was meant for the previous resident. You may be at this new address for years, yet you may still receive a legal letter or something else of importance that was not meant for you. We have all experienced this.
The sender of the letter did nothing illegal, but did you know it is highly illegal to knowingly open or withhold this letter or package from the rightful recipient or not return it to the sender?
I know this is not the law when it comes to internet email. But I am curious if you would consider mail from an attorney or from the government or someone else with important information to be considered spam and would you report them too if they made the same innocent mistake? Would you withhold an important time sensitive message that needs a response and would you not notify the sender to tell him of his honest mistake because you do not want to give away your spamtrap?
I don’t expect you to give us the email address in question and it seems quite obvious that you will not give us the identity of the member of our site whose mail you are now keeping which is not right also. It is also not necessary to respond to this last post either, I only ask that you do not report any possible emails that may be accidentally sent to this address in the future.
Sincerely,
Steven Pasternack
Sugardaddie.com
“We are not seeing any indication of a bad address or hard bounce and we never will because you have set a trap which does not give us a proper response. ”
WRONG. This spamtrap gave “a proper response” for OVER THREE YEARS. You simply didn’t check to see if it was valid for that period. This whole situation occurred because you were careless. Apparently you either won’t admit that or aren’t willing to fix the problem.
I certainly won’t quit reporting spamtrap hits I get from your site, although I don’t expect to see a great many unless I get many more spamtraps. You are NOT adhering to proper email sending standards. (The Better Business Bureau is not generally considered to be qualified to assess that — I almost choked in disbelief.) If it is embarrassing to see these reports, that’s too bad.
On the other hand, if my spamtraps quit receiving emails from your site, then there won’t be any more reports.
I wasn’t going to reply but it is needed. You have NOT answered any of my questions and you certainly are not helping.
WRONG. This spamtrap gave “a proper response” for OVER THREE YEARS. You simply didn’t check to see if it was valid for that period. This whole situation occurred because you were careless. Apparently you either won’t admit that or aren’t willing to fix the problem.
OKay, I was a bit careless 7-10 years ago for not constantly checking an opted in member of my site. Yes, that carelessness has now caused a problem ten years later. I understand that. I WANT TO FIX THIS PROBLEM!! How do you suggest I resolve this problem now? I am not talking about OTHER spam traps and how to avoid them. I am not talking about what happened 10 years ago. I want to know how I would resolve this one particular trap being set off again if it still appears as an active address that belongs to an active member. Please address this specific question and not generalities of procedures. If there is no actual solution to this specific situation, all I ask is that you do not report this particular spamtrap again as you can see I WANT TO FIX THIS! I am asking you as an expert in this area, what is the solution?
Steven Pasternack
I already told you what I suggested, based on my conviction that this spamtrap isn’t the only one on your list. Sending to a ten-year-old email address that you had not contacted isn’t a problem with one bad email address: it’s a symptom of a mailing list that’s so old most ESPs would have refused to mail to it if you’d told them what this conversation has revealed about that list. I don’t think that you’re an idiot for doing this: I’ve seen too many people who aren’t idiots but simply don’t know bulk email make similar mistakes. However, if you just get rid of one spamtrap but don’t fix the actual problem of the outdated mailing list, then I’ve wasted my time here with you.
If you repermission the list, on the other hand, you’ll fix the problem. If it really is necessary for you to have a working email address for your users, you follow up the repermissioning by having your web site to prompt those people who ignored the permission emails to update their email address. Do this, and you’ll get not only my spamtrap off of your list, but all of the other email addresses that no longer belong to a user. Some of those will also be spamtraps. You might get lucky, and not hit enough spamtraps at one location to get blocked. But do you really want to take that risk?
I can’t believe what im reading. Here’s a guy that’s trying to fix a problem you brought to his companies attention and you treat him like he does this as a practice. Wake up and smell the coffee and commend him instead of threatening him. The whole damn purpose of your job is to stop this from happening. A guy wants to better his practices and you refuse to help him. I am very curious to see your reply.
“With great power comes great responsibility.” voltaire
Once again you have given me generalities that do not address the exact problem I am asking about. We do follow these proper procdures that you have just outlined. We never have bought, rented or scraped address from the internet. All our messages to our members include links with a clear opt out option which you show in a copy of our message at the beginning of this blog. We send reminders to our members on our site to update their email addresses and there is a VERY noticeable and clear feature on our site that allows members to update their email at any time and also allows them to opt out with the click of one button. We do follow all the procedures you have outlined, and we are naturally concerned with other spam traps as well. We are not fools, we run a legitimate business and I was trying to make a point earlier that our A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau is not an indication that we adhere to proper emailing standards, but an indication of our business ethics which naturally extend to our emailing practices as well. There are dozens of possibilites as to why we unintentionally sent an email to that spamtrap and it could happen again even with all the proper procedures that you have outlined and we follow. Perhaps this is stemming from a lack of dilligence ten years ago or perhaps it is becasue a current member recently mispelled his email address while updating his account. We will never really know. It could be anything. But we do follow proper procedures. Our only concern with you is that we are not reported as unethical spammers for this one particular address if it is triggered again. Regardless of the reason that you reported us, the result could ultimately be the same for us in comparison to unethical spammers who buy lists and send unsolicited emails to non opt in email addresses. Is this fair?
I am truly done with this blog since I have failed to make you understand and address this ONE particular issue. Perhaps you do understand but fail to recognize it in this blog. Not everyone caught in a spamtrap is guilty of something. In real life, innocent people are arrested everyday.
Thank you for at least letting me voice my unedited comments in what I consider a well maintained blog. Also, thank you Metsman for the suppport! Nice to know somebody reading this understands.
Steven Pasternack
I can’t help but wonder why you are so averse to running a permission pass on your list.
From what I’ve read, you’ve been provided with exact steps as to what you need to do to resolve the problem – admittedly, if email isn’t your full-time job, and you instead wear many hats within your organisation, things like ‘repermission your list’ may not make much sense to you. In your shoes, this is what I would do:
– Send a courtesy email to all your users. A simple “We haven’t heard from you for a long time – are you still there?” for inactive users, or a “Please confirm your email address” for active users. Make sure it includes an opt-in link. If they don’t opt in again, remove their email address from your lists. That doesn’t mean you have to delete your active (or even inactive) users, merely delete their emails from your list.
– For any addresses which you delete, put a flag on their accounts, so next time they log in, they’re forced to provide (and verify) a new email address.
Those two simple steps will cleanse your list of both invalid addresses, and those who simply no longer wish to be a member. Yes, it will mean you’re sending another email to potential spam traps, including this one, but a respectable spam trap will see that this is a permission pass, and will let it slide, as long as its the last they hear from you.
After all, you’re operating a dating site. A huge number of your accounts who signed up 10 years ago will no longer be interested in your services – if you’re good, a fair proportion of those will be as a direct result of your service.
What timbstoke said. The first part of what he describes is the permission pass. A permission pass will hit spamtraps, but it shouldn’t provoke bad consequences with anybody who understands bulk email and spamtraps.
The second part isn’t a normal part of a permission pass, but it’s an obvious way to get an updated email address for an account that is being used when email is bouncing or (in this case) when a permission pass email is ignored.
I get the impression that you haven’t read a thing that I’ve said, and very much wonder why you completely ignore the solution that I proposed *which would work*, so I’m about to drop this conversation as it is getting me nowhere. However, there’s one comment that needs addressing:
Our only concern with you is that we are not reported as unethical spammers for this one particular address if it is triggered again.
You weren’t reported as “unethical spammers” in the first place. An instance of spam that was sent to a spamtrap was reported. Since single spamtrap hits can be caused by lots of things, only a few of them pointing to deliberate spamming, anybody who interprets a report of one received spam as “This sender is an unethical spammer” has misunderstood the evidence.
Moreover, if the spam continues to hit the spamtrap, what that means is that the sender was unable or unwilling to take effective action to prevent the spam from continuing to be sent. That’s still not necessary “unethical spammer”, although in this case given this thread I would conclude that this is probably a sender who isn’t willing to do the necessary work to clean up a problem that his own mistakes caused.
This isn’t a typoed email address from a more recent member of your site if per your own statements you confirm subscriptions, because this email address would never have responded to a confirmation email. Because of that statement, I had concluded that my spamtrap was from an account opened within a few months of your web site going live that was confirmed at the time, but was not detected as invalid thereafter because you either hadn’t contacted it for ten years or had ignored bounces for several of those years. If that isn’t the case, other possibilities should be considered.
In any event, if you want to fix the problem, you’ve got the information that I can give (to you or to anybody), and any advice that I have. It’s up to you now.