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Spamtraps and GDPR

In less than six month’s time, GDPR will come fully into effect. This should be nothing new to you and if you never heard of GDPR, you should run down to your Legal Department and ask for information. Speaking of Legal, the author of this blog post is no lawyer and everything written here is his own opinion.

What is GDPR?

The General Data Protection Regulation (EU 2016/679) is the new eu-wide data protection law, adopted in 2016, it will come into effect on the 25th of May, 2018. If you are a European company or have customers in Europe, you need to be compliant with GDPR.

What are Spamtraps?

I do not think we need to talk about spamtraps, when you are reading this blog. There are several posts in regards to spamtraps (e.g. this or this). I also think, that we can all agree, that sending mail to spamtraps is bad. They can get your mail blocked or junked, which not just takes time and effort to resolve, but will cost revenue in the process.

Sending mail to spamtraps, especially commercial mail, is illegal in most countries, because you usually do not have consent of the operator of that spamtrap or an active customer relationship.

Spamtraps and transactional mail?

When we talk about transactional mail, we talk about the mails like order and shipping confirmation, online tickets or boarding passes and ToC changes. These mails are cool, aren’t they? And the answer is of course … yes and no. Certainly a clean confirmation mail will not cause a huge blacklisting or at least you can talk to the Provider to resolve that issue faster than normal.

transmitting PII to a real person
transmitting PII to a real person