If you have a purely opt-in, permission based list and you’re still getting spam complaints, it’s time to take a closer look at what you’re doing.  Does your list have a lot of prospects who opt-ed in a long time ago and haven’t opened any of your emails in ages?  Perhaps your emails have too much generic information and not the focused, specific farm area type information people really want.  Perhaps you’re sending emails too often (don’t send more than once per week).  People may be making spam complaints for any or all of these reasons.  So make the necessary changes in these areas and your spam complaints will start going away.

Spam Trap – also known as honey pots, spam traps are addresses intended to catch people with harvested or purchased email lists whose recipients haven’t opt-ed in to receive their mailings.  Spam traps can come from one of two sources.  Some spam traps are intentionally put on web pages in places where they can’t be seen or with the disclaimer to people visiting the page that the given address is a trap address and should not be emailed under any circumstances.  These trap emails are posted on their own web pages by members of the anti-spam community and other concerned parties (eg. people who have registered their domain and trap emails with Project Honey Pot).  The page with the trap emails eventually gets indexed by search engines.  When spammers harvest email indiscriminately on the web using search engines their bots will inevitably pick up spam trap addresses.

The other way spam trap addresses are created is by email providers.  When one of their users doesn’t log in to their email account for too long a period or terminates their account with the provider, the provider deactivates the email account but doesn’t necessarily delete the account information.  Rather, it gets stored.  In time (perhaps after a year or more) a growing number of providers actually re-activate these dead accounts so they can receive email and then monitor them for any incoming messages.  They know anyone who has been emailing these accounts regularly from an opt-in list would have taken the email off their list long ago if they were practicing regular list hygiene and used an opt-in list.  Therefore, anyone else mailing these resurrected email accounts almost certainly harvested them or purchased them and are therefore spamming.  These email providers will almost certainly start blocking all your emails.  Worse, they may even report you to a major blacklist like SpamHaus.