Overview

Spam traps are honeypot addresses created or repurposed by mailbox providers to assess the email list management practices of email senders. Spam trap addresses are valid, so emails are delivered to them, but they never engage with the emails.
The main purpose of spam traps is to catch spammers or senders with poor list management. There are three types of traps:

• Pristine traps: These traps flag senders who send unsolicited emails. A pristine spam trap is an email address that a real person has never used and is created solely to identify spam emails.
• Recycled traps: These traps flag senders who do not maintain list hygiene. Recycled traps are old email addresses that mailbox providers converted into traps after the users abandoned them and bounced for a while.
• Typo traps:  These traps flag senders who do follow email best practices. Typo traps are addresses with typos on major domains like gail.com, yaho.com, or homail.com. Email senders implementing confirmed opt-in and sunsetting inactive users should not hit these traps.

Reasons for Spam Traps Getting into the Email List

Spam traps never sign up for emails or engage with emails. They can infiltrate your email list in several ways. A few of these are:

• If you collect users through purchasing lists, social media scraping, or any sort of explicit signup, you are likely to hit traps.
• If you do not permanently suppress users who have bounced, you are likely to hit recycled traps. Usually, when changing vendors, if you do not suppress previous-suppressed users, they might get into your list.
• If you do not sunset unengaged users, the traps in your list continue to grow.

Impact of Hitting Spam Traps

Senders who follow list management best practices should not hit spam traps. Hence, senders who consistently hit spam traps may be perceived as spammers. Essentially, in varying degrees, the impact could be:

• Delayed delivery (emails being rate-limited and deferred)
• Low delivery (emails being soft bounced)
• Low engagement (emails might be sent to spam)
• Drop in the domain and IP reputation

Preventive Measures to Avoid Spam Traps

To prevent spam traps from getting into the database and that number from growing, follow the management best practices listed below:

• Ensure user collection methods are clean.
• Suppress hard bounce immediately. Ensure these remain suppressed even when migrating to a different vendor. To know how to suppress hard bounce, refer here.
• Sunset inactive users after 9 months of inactivity and permanently suppress them from emails