Spam Traps – Guide For Email Senders

Spam traps are one of the worst types of email addresses that wind up on email lists. If you’re worried about spam traps hurting your email deliverabilityⓘA sender’s ability to reach the recipient’s inbox with their outgoing emails. It may also describe the ratio of emails delivered to the inbox vs. those sent to spam or blocked by the receiving server., make sure to read our guide below.

You’ll learn:

• What spam traps are and what their role is in spam prevention
• How they can end up on your email list
• What you can do to avoid hitting a spam trap

The most effective email lists are the purest. It’s why marketers focus not just on the quality of their content, but also on their email hygiene. Using an email list cleaningⓘThe process of removing invalid and high-risk emails, such as spam traps or disposable emails, from an email list. Email list cleaning can be performed after gathering data via email validation. service regularly is the easiest way to stay on top of data decay – and avoid spam traps.

With a little knowledge and effort, you can protect your list from bad data and increase your chances to land in the inbox.

Understanding Spam Traps

A spam trap, sometimes referred to as a honeypot, will appear to be a real email address that belongs to a real person – but it isn't.

Spam traps don't belong to an individual and have no value in outbound communication. Since spam trap addresses never opt-in to receive emails, any inbound messages would flag the sender as a spammer.

Not maintaining good email hygiene and not abiding by the rules of permission-based email marketing is the only way spam traps could end up on your email lists.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and blacklist providers (i.e. Composite Blocking, SpamCop) commonly use spam traps to catch malicious senders. But also, lawful senders who don't maintain their email hygiene or use poor list building strategies can raise a red flag, too.

Pristine spam traps, often collected by web scrapers, are the most dangerous because ISPs regard sending to them as abusive.

Related Links:

Disposable Emails

Abuse emails

Catch-all emailsⓘAn email set up by a business to capture email messages sent to their name via an invalid address (e.g., j0hn@company.com instead of john@company.com). Catch-all inboxes receive a high volume of spam and may not be actively monitored by the owner.

Free Email Verifier