Spam traps and other malicious emails continue to plague the email marketing world. Regular small businesses, website owners and email marketers are getting shut down from their email service providers without notice. Couple this with lawsuits from California or some ambulance chasing lawyer, and you’re in hot water. Any way you slice it, you need to remove spam traps and bad emails to avoid major unexpected costs or getting put out of business.
I’m perplexed by all the marketers I meet at shows and events that have no idea how easy it is to clean up their lists or implement simple checks on their lead forms. None of this is overly technical, so I am going to show you how easy it is to remove spam traps and malicious emails for free. Yes, truly free. No strings. I will also show you some other cool options you can implement with almost no technical skills.
Without boring you with all of the details and types of spam traps and malicious emails, we’ll just assume you don’t want any of them on your list. If you want to achieve this, you’ll need regular updates that flag spam traps and potentially malicious emails. I have never seen a free way to easily access these updates, until now.
The 4 main ways to remove spam traps and malicious emails
1 – Suppression Files (Free)
2 – Real time form validation
3 – Import & Clean software
4 – Upload Leads & Clean
1. Suppression Files – Remove Spam Traps for FREE
Suppression files are an absolute must for anyone who sends email. Yet few people utilize them. Most email marketing software or ESP providers offer a built in ability for you to upload a list of bad emails that you never want to accept into the system (or send emails to). This list could be spam traps, bots, lawyers or simply hard bounced, undeliverable emails that could hurt you. Adding to this suppression file is free and extremely useful.
2. Real Time Form Validation
Most advanced marketers with funnels churning out a substantial amount of leads use real time form validation to remove spam traps. Essentially, when the consumer places their email address in your form and hits “submit” to get your offer, the email is validated in milliseconds as a success or fail. For newer marketers using sites like Clickfunnels or Instapage, this is a tricky option to implement, so it is easier to default to #1 above.
3. Import & Clean Leads Via Software
When you are running multiple different lead captures pages or funnels, you will need a better way to capture leads, remove spam traps, and sort and sift all of your marketing lead efforts. Too often marketers lose sight of the significance of organization here and it ends up being a costly mess. When you use software like Listflex, you have access to a suite of tools to help you become more profitable while showing you how to automate and remove spam traps.
4. Upload Leads & Clean
Manually uploading leads to a tool like ListIntel provides the same luxuries as above without needing any technical know how. You can load up a file and within minutes have all of the bad emails sent to you. Add them to your internal blacklist or suppression files to keep and benefit from forever. The nice thing about ListIntel.com is that it requires no contracts or long term agreements. Just upload and clean leads anytime you like.
So how can you receive updates for free?
Sign up below to join our Listflex Blacklist newsletter. When you sign up, you’ll receive free access to weekly updates listing emails we’ve personally identified as harmful. No cost. Simply sign up and get new updates each week. These are NOT opt outs; these are emails identified as problematic and will likely cause issues. You will want to add these to any existing suppression file that you have with your ESP or lead software.
Updated lists from the top 3 Validation Companies
We have tested countless validation companies over the past seven years and narrowed it down to 3 that we communicate with daily. These companies have the biggest and baddest teams on the block when it comes to innovation and threat detection, and they’re our secret weapon. To date, they have helped us identify and keep our partners safe from over 11 Million spam traps or malicious emails.
When you join the newsletter, look for our updates each Monday. We’re cranking through millions of records a day to remove spam traps and malicious emails. This weekly update won’t cost you anything and could save you the headache of getting shut down from an ESP or a potential lawsuit.
Questions? Just let me know,
Scott Heistand
PS: If you skipped all the way to the bottom, you can get our weekly blacklist of suppressed emails for free, just by signing up. No strings or costs. We’re already doing the work and collecting thousands of spam traps and malicious emails each week. We are now sharing this with the email marketing community.
