Among regular email addresses, there are some that exist only to catch spammers — these are known as spam traps. In this guide, I’ll explain what spam traps are, how they differ from disposable email addresses, the consequences of sending emails to them, and how to avoid falling into such traps.
What are spam traps?
Spam traps are email addresses designed to catch spammers and senders who don’t follow proper email collection practices. They are often placed by email providers and anti-spam organizations to detect senders that use outdated, scraped, or purchased lists.
When a sender emails a spam trap, mailbox providers flag them as untrustworthy. This damages their sender reputation, causing more of their emails to land in recipients’ spam folders or even get blocked entirely.
Spam traps vs disposable mailboxes
Disposable mailboxes are temporary email addresses created by real users — often to sign up for services without sharing their regular email address. These addresses work like normal emails but are short-lived and eventually expire.
Imagine you want to download a PDF guide but don’t want to receive marketing emails afterward. In this case, you might use a disposable mailbox to get the download link without sharing your real contact information.
Among the most famous email services that offer disposable emails are Temp Mail, Guerrilla Mail, 10 Minute Mail, and Mailinator.
Spam traps, on the other hand, aren’t used by real people and exist solely to catch irresponsible senders that send spam emails.
While emails sent to disposable mailboxes may go unread, hitting a spam trap has far worse consequences. It can damage your sender reputation, reduce email deliverability and inbox placement, and lead to blacklisting.
Types of spam traps with examples
There are three types of spam traps: purposefully created traps, reused old addresses, and unintentional traps caused by typos. Let’s take a closer look at each.
Spam traps created on purpose (pristine)
Pristine traps are email addresses specifically designed to detect and block spammers and unsolicited senders. They are set up by email providers, anti-spam organizations, and security firms and have never been used for personal or business communication.
Since real users didn’t create these addresses and they never opted into any mailing lists, any emails sent to them indicate poor list hygiene on the sender’s part.
It’s impossible to distinguish a pristine spam trap from a regular email address. It can look like any personal or business email, such as:
Repurposed addresses
Repurposed or recycled spam traps are old email addresses that once belonged to real users but were later taken over by email providers or anti-spam organizations. These addresses remain inactive for a long time — typically 6 months to a few years — before being reactivated. However, they are not reactivated for personal use; instead, they are used to monitor senders who fail to clean their contact lists.
Since legitimate senders should regularly remove inactive contacts, emailing repurposed spam trap email addresses shows that a sender isn’t properly updating their email list.
A repurposed spam trap is also difficult to detect. It may include an old organization name or domain but this is not always the case:
Email with typos
People can unintentionally create spam traps by making typos in email addresses. The most common mistakes happen in the domain name — for example, instead of entering “harry.potter@gmail.com,” they type “harry.potter@gmial.com” or “harry.potter@gnail.com.”
Email providers and anti-spam organizations track messages sent to these misspelled addresses to identify senders who don’t validate contacts or keep incorrect emails on their lists for too long.
How to identify and remove spam traps
As I mentioned earlier, you cannot detect spam traps just by looking at one. But what about typo spam traps, you might ask? Well, yes, if you’re working with a small list of 50 contacts, you could manually catch obvious mistakes. However, for larger lists, that’s not practical.
Here are some more reliable and efficient methods to identify spam traps.
- Run your list through email validation services like ZeroBounce, NeverBounce, or Validity (formerly BriteVerify) to detect inactive, invalid, or suspicious addresses.
- Analyze engagement metrics after each campaign. Spam traps don’t open, click, or reply. If an address has zero engagement over 3 to 5 consecutive campaigns (typically within 30-90 days), it could be a trap.
- Check for frequent hard bounces. If certain addresses consistently bounce, they are very likely to be repurposed spam traps.
- Take a close look at role-based addresses. Emails like info@microsoft.com or support@amazon.com are often risky because multiple people share them and may not engage with emails. While not all role-based emails are spam traps, some can be converted into traps if abandoned. If you have role-based addresses on your list, check their engagement, and verify them with an email checker before sending marketing messages.
- Know your list acquisition sources. If some emails came from purchased lists, outdated databases, or scraping, they are very likely to contain email spam traps. If you’ve acquired your list this way (which I highly recommend you don’t), go back to step 1 in this section.
Once you’ve identified spam traps, remove them from your list without hesitation. These emails will not bring you any value but will only have a negative impact on future email campaign performance, including reduced engagement, higher bounce rates, and potential blocks by email providers.
How do spam traps get on your email addresses list?
Since spam traps look like regular email addresses, you may not realize you’ve collected one until your delivery rates start to decline. Here are the most common ways spam traps can sneak into your list:
- Purchasing email lists. Bought contact lists often contain outdated or fabricated addresses, including spam traps placed by anti-spam organizations.
- Scraping emails from websites. Anti-spam organizations intentionally place spam traps on public websites, knowing that some senders will collect emails through scraping. If your list includes addresses gathered this way, there’s a high chance you’ve picked up a spam trap.
- Keeping old, inactive subscribers on your list. If you keep sending to long-abandoned email addresses, some may have been repurposed into spam traps over time. Since these addresses don’t bounce, they can stay on your list unnoticed.
- Not validating email addresses during sign-up. If you don’t validate user emails when people fill in signup forms, mistyped addresses can slip into your list. These typos are monitored and can be turned into spam traps.
- Adding role-based addresses to your list. Over time, abandoned role-based addresses can be repurposed as spam traps, so keep an eye on them.
Consequences of hitting spam traps
The impact of hitting a spam trap varies based on the type of trap you’ve triggered. Some traps result in minor issues, while others can lead to severe problems, potentially preventing you from sending emails altogether. Here’s what happens with each type:
- Pristine spam traps. These are the most critical spam traps. Since a real person never owned them, emailing them signals poor list acquisition practices. Hitting these fake email addresses can lead to immediate IP address or domain blacklisting, severe email deliverability drop, and permanent damage to your sender reputation. If you want to know how to get your email out of a blocklist, read our dedicated guide.
- Recycled traps. These traps are less severe but still harmful. They indicate poor list hygiene, as you’re emailing inactive contacts. Sending to repurposed traps repeatedly will harm your sender reputation, meaning that subscribers with legitimate emails who anticipate your messages may not get them or get them in the spam folder.
- Typo-based spam traps. While not as damaging, typo traps suggest you’re not validating emails properly. If you often send to common typos, email providers will start filtering your messages as spam. As a result, your future campaigns will have lower inbox placement and engagement rates.
Hitting spam traps will waste resources, damage your reputation, and hurt campaign results. It can even lead to legal consequences, like fines for non-compliance with email marketing regulations.
How to avoid spam traps
It’s always better to prevent an issue than to fix it later. Moreover, the practices I’m about to share are part of email best practices. By following them, you’ll not only avoid spam traps but also improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
- Build your contact list organically. Focus on organic list building through valuable content, engaging events, great deals, and lead magnets. You don’t need a large list to succeed—keeping it small but engaged is better. Subscribers who are genuinely interested in your messages are much more likely to convert.
- Validate emails at sign-up. Use a real-time email validation tool at the sign-up stage to catch typos and invalid addresses before they make it onto your list. These tools’ functionality ensures you collect only legitimate email addresses.
- Use double opt-in. Double opt-in helps you ensure that new subscribers genuinely want to receive your emails when they confirm their subscription via a follow-up email. This is the easiest email verification process to ensure email addresses you’re collecting are legitimate and not spam traps.
- Clean email lists often. Responsible list management includes removing inactive subscribers, bounced emails, invalid email addresses, and anyone who hasn’t engaged with your emails in the past 3-6 months (or after 3-5 email marketing campaigns). For inactive subscribers, you can run re-engagement campaigns before removing them. However, the longer you keep inactive outdated emails, the higher the chance they’ll turn into spam traps.
- Monitor your engagement metrics. Low open, click-through, and conversion rates signal that something is wrong. If certain email addresses consistently show no interaction, they could be spam traps. And even if they aren’t, these addresses waste your budget and negatively impact your campaign results.
- Avoid role-based emails. Only keep them on your list if you’ve confirmed they are actively monitored.
Unfortunately, there are some other reasons why your emails can land in a junk folder. For example your email content, subject line, or its design can trigger a spam filter. You can use Mailtrap’s Spam Checker to quickly assess your emails before email sending and improve their chances of landing in the inbox. Also, you can learn about Gmail’s spam filter and Outlook’s spam filter peculiarities to understand how your emails are handled on those platforms.
Wrapping up
By implementing the practices outlined above, you can effectively steer clear of spam traps and the negative consequences they bring. For additional tips on optimizing your email campaigns, don’t miss our next blog post: