Updates to Validity's Domain Sensor Network

[Anonymous]

Hello, 

We regularly evaluate and enhance the mechanisms behind our services to ensure our customers are getting the most value and having the best experience with our products. In early April, we implemented a new system that changed the way we collect and analyze data within our Domain Data Sensor Network, the engine that powers Spam Trap and Suspicious Mail data within Everest. In addition, we changed some partners within our Domain Data Sensor Network to give you greater visibility into traps that you may already have been hitting.  

This allowed us to optimize how we classify domain trap types of pristine, recycled, and typo. As a result, you may see an increase in volume across all trap types starting April 1st. Rest assured, this is not indicative of a new issue within your email program. 

Since then, we uncovered that data from one of our partners was not meeting our needs to accurately classify recycled and pristine trap types. This required reassessing hundreds of thousands of records to ensure classification is accurate moving forward. During this time, we also took the opportunity to address a bug where pristine traps were showing ages of 53 years. As of May 12th, pristine and recycled trap classification as well as the age of the trap is accurate.  

We continuously work with our partners to ensure data accuracy, in addition to our internal monitoring of our records.  

Comment below if you have questions or reach out to support@validity.com

Update 5/17/23: As of May 12th, pristine and recycled trap classification as well as the age of the trap is accurate for domains >30 days. We are still working to rectify the issue for new domains and expect to have a full resolution met by the end of June.

-The Validity Team 

[APL]

I'm still seeing spam trap with over 3478 days in my reports, it's that accurate? Thanks!

[JulieS_Validity]

Hi @APL 

Thanks for checking! Yes, that is accurate and the trap would be about 9.5 years old now. FYI, the trap age indicates when the trap was created and/or acquired by our network. 

Julie

[APL]

Thanks @JulieS_Validity, so if the trap is well defined why the list validation process do NOT informed correctly what's the email being used as spamtrap with classification and the trap age?

[JulieS_Validity]

Good question, @APL  List Validation can help flag or catch some typo spam traps, but a recycled or pristine spam trap is an actual email address, just owned not by an individual, but rather an entity.

Spam trap email addresses are meant to catch bad actors, or to shine a light on your email acquisition practices (never buy a list of email addresses), your list hygiene (or lack of), or to encourage you to sunset an email address that has never (or extremely rarely) engaged with your email program. 

Hope that helps!

[APL]

@JulieS_Validity every info helps, thanks "...or to encourage you to sunset an email address that has never (or extremely rarely) engaged with your email program. ..." those spamtraps are usualy a mistery to solve and if we have old contacts in the database, purging process, could be changing that date of creation from the database and impacting the clients side of analisys, I don't have 100% sure that the ISP's are not engaging those spamtraps to bring more confusion into the analisys, I see folks in the past comment about having activating campaigns only for subscribers that opened and click any email and when they used the reputation tool, there it was the spamtrap being raised into the reports...

[CatieB_Validity]

@APL hello! My name is Catie and I'm a senior email support representative here at Validity and I wanted to jump in.

As Julie mentioned, the absolute best way to remove spam traps from your sending lists is to ensure that you have a solid and consistent engagement protocol because spam traps in general cannot engage with email. Some senders have engagement protocols as short as 6 months or even 90 days. We go into a lot of detail on this and other troubleshooting steps in our article here: https://knowledge.validity.com/hc/en-us/articles/360025313452-Troubleshooting-spam-traps

It is incredibly (as in, I've never seen it happen in my time at Validity) rare for a spam trap to be able to engage in any way with email. Most of those mailboxes are never accessed, because they were of course never designed to actually recieve mail, and any that are accessed are purely for maintenance purposes and email almost certainly will not be opened in those cases.

As for your concern about the date of creation, that date of creation is given to us by the spam trap managers themselves. No action that you take on your side will impact that date, or any other data that is provided within Everest. Please let me know if we can address anything else!