Spam Traps

Spam traps are a method used by major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and blacklist providers to identify spammers and hurt their deliverability. A spam trap looks like a real email address, but it doesn't belong to a real person and can't be used for any kind of communication. These addresses will never open, never bounce, and (once allowed on your list) will continue to negatively affect your deliverability at that domain. There are two types of Spam Traps: Pristine and Recycled. There is another category which is often referred to as a typo trap.

• Pristine spam traps, also referred to as pure traps or honeypots, are email addresses created solely to capture spammers. Pristine traps were never actual email addresses, but are left in the wild for those with questionable list acquisition practices (such as scraping websites for email addresses) to find.
• Recycled spam traps, sometimes called re-purposed spam traps, are addresses that were at one-time legitimate destination addresses but have since been re-purposed to catch abusive mail. After being dormant for an extended period of time (usually months) some mail providers such as Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail, and others will reactivate a select group of addresses as traps to target those with weak data-quality practices. Sending regularly to your list would have bounced the email address prior to it becoming a spam trap, but once it becomes a trap it will remain on your list until it is identified and removed.
• Typo traps. Common misspellings of domains are known as typo traps. While not traps in the traditional sense, they are not the email/domain you are attempting to send to and may be owned by someone pulling that data for their own purposes. IP monitoring does look at the number of typo traps hit, and the high spikes can affect how those IPs are viewed/trusted. In cleansing, these can show up as a variety of different categories.

Once a trap makes it onto your list, they are notoriously hard to find (they are designed to prevent spammers from easily removing them from their lists). Through both Validity and SNDS (Smart Network Data Services), emfluence tracks spam traps hit on the platform's IP. Each will provide a date of the spam trap hit. Validity includes all domains while SNDS' list covers only Microsoft domains (such as outlook.com, hotmail.com, msn.com and live.com). Once a spam trap has been hit, the best course of action is to do a list cleanse to find and suppress the trap from ever receiving email again.When cleansing a list, any known dangerous addresses such as bots, traps, and the like will be placed in the blacklist file. Our provider suggest these should be suppressed within your account. You can learn more about list cleanses here.