What is a spam trap? Types and how to keep them off your list
A spam trap is an email address that should never receive legitimate mail, used by mailbox providers and blocklist operators to identify senders with poor list practices.
Pristine traps were never used by a person. They are published where only address harvesters will find them, so any mail they receive comes from a scraped or bought list.
Recycled traps are old addresses that were abandoned, bounced for a long time and were then turned into traps. They catch senders who keep mailing contacts who stopped engaging years ago.
Typo traps are addresses on misspelled domains, such as gmial.com, that catch lists with no checks at signup.
Hitting traps can damage your sender reputation or get your IP or domain blacklisted. Traps are designed to look like ordinary addresses, so no verification service can promise to find them all; good list practices are the real defense.
With Easy Email Verification
Verification helps with the traps you can avoid: it flags typo domains (with a did_you_mean suggestion) and invalid addresses that recycled traps often start as. Combine it with double opt-in, never buying lists and removing contacts who do not engage. If you suspect a listing, run the free blacklist check.
Check an address for freeClean a whole list
Related
- Sender reputation: Sender reputation is how trustworthy mailbox providers consider your sending domain and IP address, based on how your past email was received.
- Email blacklist (blocklist): An email blacklist, also called a blocklist or DNSBL, is a public list of IP addresses or domains associated with spam, which mail servers consult before accepting a message.
- Double opt-in: Double opt-in is a signup process where the new subscriber must confirm the address by clicking a link sent to it before being added to the list.
- Email list decay: Email list decay is the gradual loss of valid, reachable addresses in a list over time, even when nobody adds bad data to it.
- All glossary terms