What are spam traps?

Spam traps are email addresses controlled by anti-spam organisations or email providers used to monitor the activity of email senders.

There are several types of spam traps (pristine, recycled and typos), but they all have one thing in common – they're not owned and controlled by a regular person. Spam trap owners use them to monitor who sends emails to them because it indicates bad sending practices and list management.

Under normal circumstances, a spam trap address would not end up on any mailing list, so if someone is sending emails there, it indicates that they obtained their email list in a nefarious manner or didn't maintain good list hygiene by regularly removing long-inactive subscribers.

Continuous sending to spam traps can lead to negative consequences like worse inbox placement, delays or even block bounces, so it's very important to keep them off your mailing list. It's impossible to find out which emails are spam traps as this information is not shared publicly, but you can ensure that you don't send to them by regularly cleaning your list of inactive contacts.

The most straightforward way to do that is to remove contacts who don't open your emails, you can learn how to do that here: How to clean your list from non-openers.

There are also other ways in which you can maintain good list hygiene. We list some of the best practices you can follow in this article: How to keep your list clean.