A spam trap is an email address that looks real but is used to catch senders with poor mailing list practices. This article is for anyone who sends email to a list of contacts, such as newsletters or promotions. After reading it, you will know how spam traps work and how to keep them off your list so your emails reach your recipients.
What is a spam trap
A spam trap is an email address that looks real but has no person behind it. Internet service providers (ISPs, the companies that provide email and internet access), anti-spam organizations, and similar groups use spam traps to find senders who email inactive mailboxes or contacts who have not given permission.
Spam traps exist to catch spammers and other malicious senders. However, legitimate senders can also trigger them if they collect email addresses carelessly or do not keep their mailing lists up to date.
Types of spam traps
Spam traps fall into two types, depending on how they are created.
Pristine spam traps
Pristine spam traps, also called pure spam traps, are created only to catch senders. They were never real mailboxes. They appear on public websites but stay hidden from regular visitors.
The only people who find these addresses are senders who collect addresses by scraping websites (automatically copying anything that looks like an email address). A purchased mailing list can also contain pristine spam traps.
Recycled spam traps
Recycled spam traps are addresses that once belonged to real people but are no longer in use. When you send to an address like this, the mailbox provider (the company that hosts the mailbox) returns a hard bounce. A hard bounce is a message telling you the address is not valid and you should remove it from your list.
After some time, the mailbox provider stops returning hard bounces for the address and turns it into a spam trap. Senders who keep emailing the address are then treated as spammers.
Why spam traps matter
Depending on the type of spam trap, sending email to even one can significantly reduce how many of your emails are delivered.
Sending to a spam trap tells ISPs that you either collected your addresses using poor practices or did not check your list for valid addresses. ISPs and blacklist providers (organizations that publish lists of senders to block) monitor spam traps continuously. They trace every email sent to a spam trap, and they add the sender to a blacklist.
Avoid spam traps
Follow these steps each time you build or add to a mailing list.
| alert-warning | Sending emails to spam traps can lead to permanent suspension of your domain on Titan. |
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When you build your mailing list, do not buy or rent an email list.
You cannot know how the addresses in a purchased list were collected. If the seller used poor collection practices, the list is likely to contain spam traps.
alert-success Need to send the same email to many people at once? Use a third-party email marketing service, such as Mailchimp or SendGrid, for your campaigns. In the tool you use to collect sign-ups, turn on double opt-in.
With double opt-in, a person joins your list only after they confirm their sign-up. This confirms that the address belongs to a real person.
Before you add a new address to your list, verify it.
Ask the person to enter a one-time code you send to their address, or to click a link you email to them. This keeps fake addresses off your list. A fake address will, at best, bounce (come back as undeliverable) and, at worst, be a spam trap.
What success looks like
Every address on your mailing list belongs to a real person who chose to join and confirmed their address. Because you send only to verified addresses, you reduce the chance of reaching a spam trap, and your emails are less likely to be blocked or blacklisted.