A spam trap is an email address used to catch senders with poor list habits. Nobody reads it, so any email it receives shows the sender didn't get the address from a real person. Blocklist operators and inbox providers run them.
The main kinds
- Pristine traps: addresses that were never used by anyone, planted where scrapers collect addresses. Hitting one points to a scraped or bought list.
- Recycled traps: old addresses abandoned by their owners, bounced for a while, then turned into traps. Hitting one points to an old, unverified list.
- Typo traps: misspelled domains such as
gmial.com.
What happens when you hit one
A pristine trap can put your domain or IP on a blocklist quickly; recycled and typo traps lower your reputation. You're never told which address was the trap.
Avoiding them
Build lists from current sources, verify them right before sending, remove hard bounces for good and don't email old lists nobody has touched in a year. Email verification can't spot every trap, but it removes the dead addresses that recycled traps used to be.