How to Avoid Email Spam Traps: Best Practices for Marketers
Created to catch malicious actors and negligent businesses, spam traps have quickly become popular among ISPs, mailbox providers, blacklist vendors, and anti-spam organizations. They help them improve email ecosystem’s health and integrity and protect regular users from attacks, maintaining email channels as a reliable, safe, and effective communication tool.
Unfortunately, this solution has imposed certain challenges. As spam traps are developed to match the keenness of hackers, they have different origins that make them difficult to identify. They easily find their way into a company’s mailing list. Almost every company has encountered damaging email addresses in its lists at least once.
All spam traps have consequences. They usually have a negative effect, from heavy penalties on your IP and Domain reputation to lowering your deliverability rate. It is very important to stay away from them to ensure your company continues with its activity in the channel. Here are the best practices and tips on how to avoid email spam traps.
What Are Spam Traps?
First, a bit of theory.
A spam trap is a fake and most often set-up email address. It could be intentionally created by access control mechanisms and organizations or formed accidentally when left abandoned by its previous owner. It might have a correct form (looking like a real person’s address) or an incorrect one, including deliberate syntax and format mistakes. Whatever the case, it cannot be used for any communication, especially between a company and its clients.
Internet Service Providers, mailbox operators, email blacklist vendors, and internet and email security organizations use it to improve email ecosystem and protect users from hackers and cyber threats. They employ it to identify spammers, companies, and entrepreneurs who are not following email marketing best practices, behave suspiciously in the channel, or have poor intentions.
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Free Email BuilderFree Email TemplatesA spam trap could appear in a subscription list for many reasons:
- It could be collected by crawling scripts that harvest publicly available contact addresses from websites, forums, and social media.
- It could be brought from negligent third parties from whom the company has bought or rented a list of contacts.
- It could end up on your list due to human errors, as potential subscribers may enter incorrect email addresses, which may be a spam trap.
- It could be fake submissions when individuals intentionally enter invalid or non-existent email addresses to get access to the gated content.
- It could be inserted into the subscription list by the spam bot or hacker.
It should be noted that spam traps may appear in your subscription list due to many other reasons. For example, valid email addresses in your subscription list are sometimes converted into spam traps because their owners abandon them. Therefore, one of the best practices to avoid email spam traps is to sift through your subscription list regularly and define inactive subscribers whose addresses might eventually become spam traps. More about that later.
Three Types of Spam Traps
There are three basic types of email spam traps. They have various origins; therefore, they affect your deliverability, email activity, sender’s score, and brand’s reputation in the channel and market differently.
Pristine Spam Trap
Pristine spam traps, also known as pure spam traps, are email addresses intentionally created by anti-spam organizations, internet service providers, or blacklist providers. They are fake and have never belonged to or used by a real person.
Pure spam traps are published on public websites yet hidden through HTML from regular visitors’ eyes. They are harmless for website visitors. However, as they are embedded into the code, crawlers and scripts that scrap websites identify them. They automatically gather these contact addresses and then sell them to negligent companies.
Hitting pristine spam traps has the most drastic impact on the company’s email channel activity. It indicates that the company resorts to bad practices in acquiring subscribers and ipso facto violates GDPR, CAN-SPAM regulations, and some international laws. The consequences are harsh, from losing the sender’s score to blacklisting.
Recycled Spam Traps
Recycled spam traps are email addresses repurposed by ISPs, blacklist providers, and anti-spam organizations. Unlike pure spam traps, these contact addresses once belonged to real people but were abandoned for various reasons. The most popular scenarios are role-based working addresses of ex-employees, university email addresses of students who have already graduated, personal accounts no longer being used, and technical issues like defunct domains.
The advantage of this type of spam trap is that it is a valid address that looks and feels pretty much normal. It is difficult to say whether it is a spam trap or not. It could be easily found in your subscription list, as it might once belong to an active subscriber.
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Try Startup App Try Slides AppOther ProductsSending digital correspondence to such contact addresses causes hard, rarely soft bounces. This is a sign for ISPs and mailbox providers that you do not regularly manage your subscription list. This is a poor practice for companies in email channels. However, it does not have such drastic aftereffects as encountering a pristine spam trap. Nevertheless, over time, you might see a decline in deliverability, sender score, and reputation, resulting in more severe consequences.
Typo Spam Traps
Typo spam traps are the trickiest because they usually look legitimate. They have one or two mistakes in syntax that can barely be noticed. ISPs and others set them up to monitor and catch companies with poor email practices.
These spam traps may appear in an email list mostly due to a company’s negligence during the collection process. For instance, if the company does not have a double opt-in registration or validation system that checks the correctness of the newly acquired contact address, any subscriber may sign up for the email list with an unintentional mistake in their contact address.
Much like recycled spam traps, they do not cause drastic outcomes. Nevertheless, they make companies look suspicious to ISPs and others, as they indicate that the sender was negligent in acquiring leads and maintaining a subscription list.

Common types of spam traps (infographic by SafetyMails)
Why Avoid Spam Traps?
Although not all spam traps are created equally, influencing campaigns and companies differently, they are still harmful. Here are the most popular consequences that businesses face after encountering spam traps.
Looking Suspicious
If you have spam traps in your subscription list, you will likely send them digital correspondence. You will encounter bounces that will be hard most of the time. The higher the hard bounce rate, the more anti-spam organizations and inbox providers think of your behavior as suspicious.
At a minimum, they will put you under their radar and critically inspect your correspondence, paying attention to any changes in your sending routine. This could be a real problem for many companies that tend to increase their sending volume during holidays and popular sale events like Black Friday or Christmas, as ISPs and mailbox providers may reject these connections.
Wasted Resources
The second good reason to avoid spam traps in your subscription list lies in minimizing wasted resources. Every email campaign involves human effort, time, and money. Every spam trap means some of these investments will be spent in vain. The more spam traps you have, the more investments you lose.
According to studies, the cost of undelivered emails for businesses in the US is $164 million daily or $59.5 billion yearly. While this financial damage is not big for small companies and startups, it might be pretty tangible for businesses that grow and expand their sphere of influence.
Get Blacklisted
Third, your company might get blacklisted. Having pristine spam traps in your subscription list is one of the worst scenarios for companies as ISPs and mailbox providers consider such companies spammers. Along with having a rigorous inspection of every correspondence, they might eventually add an IP and domain name of the company to the blacklist.
The repercussions of being on a blacklist vary, yet they all damage company’s presence and activity in email channels. From reputation damage to ISPs and mailbox providers rejecting email right away, companies suffer a great aftermath. To make matters worse, it is not that easy to get out of the blacklist, especially from serious players like Spamhaus. It takes time, effort, and additional knowledge from your email marketing team to sort this out.
It also should be noted that not only pristine spam traps lead to blacklisting. If you persistently send emails to honeypots and typo spam traps, you may also end up in the blacklist.
Damaged Reputation
Sending emails to spam traps will not go unnoticed. Although it may not be evident immediately, it will become tangible later.
The reason is simple. When ISPs and mailbox providers consider your behavior suspicious, they might decrease your channel activity by rejecting your emails or putting them into spam folders by default. As a result, you start to lose your uninterrupted connection with your contacts and excellent opportunities to deliver the right message to the right crowd at the right time. This undermines a company’s presence and relationships with subscribers, damaging brand image and reputation.
Last but not least
The last but not least reason to care about spam traps is that you might not even know they could be on your subscription list. You might create legitimate digital newsletters, follow GDPR and CAN-SPAM ACT, never buy or rent contacts from third parties, thoughtfully develop campaigns, and have a double opt-in form for acquiring new leads. However, you might still end up with spam traps in your subscription list.
Fake contact addresses have different natures and origins, so some may unintentionally appear on your list. The most popular scenario for companies that collect subscribers using transparent methods is encountering recycled spam traps as their subscribers become inactive. Who wants to have bad instances in one of the most precious and important business assets? Your hardly-earned list of potentially repeating customers and loyal brand fans should stay pristine and clean to serve its task well.
How to Identify Spam Traps
Spam traps can find their way onto legitimate email lists. Even companies with the best intentions and practices may have them. To make matters worse, detecting them could be tricky, as they usually look exactly like real email addresses. You may even easily send your promotion to them. So, how do you identify them? There are several techniques and, most importantly, tools.
If you have a small subscription list, you may inspect it on your own. You can detect spam traps through two main patterns. They might have barely noticeable yet critical typos, especially in the mailbox provider’s name. Or they might come across as sketchy, irrelevant, fake, and ridiculous.
Another good way to identify spam traps is to inspect hard bounces. This is the main indicator that the contact address is bad. Although it might not always be a spam trap, it still harms your presence and the sender’s score. Note you cannot revive it like a soft bounce. The only thing you can do is remove it from your subscription list.
Track key email engagement metrics. This is another good place to detect signs of something wrong with your subscription list. Since spam traps are not real contact addresses and do not belong to users, you will never get a reaction from them. They will never be opened.
Therefore, critical indicators such as hard bounce, soft bounce, deliverability, and open rates should be inspected. If you notice that some email addresses have poor metrics, these might be spam traps. It would also help to look at inactive and dormant subscribers. Even if they are real people with real addresses, they are already uninterested in your brand. The rule of thumb is to separate them into a group and initiate a re-engagement campaign. Remove them from your list without hard feelings if this tactic is not working.
The good news is that you can automate this process, saving your precious time and human resources. Whether you have a big or small list, it is highly recommended that you delegate this job to professional software, as it might have a more rigorous process for determining malicious email addresses.
For those of you who seek instruments for a good scrubbing of your mailing lists, here are the two good options to try:
Verifalia is a free tool for validating contact addresses in a subscription list. It verifies the existence of an email address in 30 steps, including checking the formatting and syntax, verifying the domain name and its DNS records, and detecting disposable email addresses. You can integrate it with your application through its open-source API.
Another free instrument to try is Hunter. Its prime function is to help companies polish their subscription lists and achieve pristine cleanness by detecting all bad instances. As befits, it sifts through the collection of contacts and checks each one using its AI-powered system. It validates format, syntax, domain information, the response from email servers, etc.
If pricing is not your concern, you can always try premium tools, generally available in popular email service providers like Hubspot or standalone platforms like Neverbounce or Mailtrap.
When verifying email lists, it is important to consider accuracy, speed, reporting, and integration factors. These criteria make this process productive and effective.
How to Remove Spam Traps from a Subscription List
No one-size-fits-all solution exists for removing spam traps from your email list, as every company has an individual strategy. However, everyone includes these basic steps in their routine.
Step 1 – Analyze subscribers against engagement metrics. Focus on deliverability rates, especially bounces, spam, and open rates. Identify active and inactive contacts and separate them into two groups.
What are the criteria for inactive subscribers? Some professionals believe that contacts who have not engaged with their correspondence for 6 months are inactive, while others consider subscribers to be “cold” if they have not interacted with the brand within 3 months.
This term largely depends on the target audience, niche, product, and company’s strategy in the channel. Start with 6 months. If it does not work, narrow the window to 3 months.
Step 2 – Check inactive contacts in a verification platform. Remove those that fail the test.
Step 3 – Devise and run re-engagement campaigns for those inactive subscribers who passed the verification test. They could be dormant, so you have another chance to bring them back by running win-over campaigns. However, remove them from the subscription list if the re-engagement strategy does not work. Even if they are not spam traps, they might eventually become ones.
Step 4 – Find all hard bounces and remove them immediately.
Step 5 – Closely inspect soft bounces. Some might eventually turn into hard bounces. Put them into a separate folder to monitor their status.
Step 6 – Address all unsubscribe requests by removing them from the list. If you want to re-engage those subscribers later, separate these contacts into individual groups and monitor them.
Step 7 – Determine blacklisted email addresses and remove them from the subscription list. As the name has it, these are contact addresses that blacklist providers believe to conduct spam activity. As a company that tries to reach them even unintentionally, you may get under the blacklist radar as well, looking suspicious for other email environment participants like ISPs and mailbox providers.
How to Avoid Email Spam Traps: Best Practices for Marketers
Knowing how to identify and remove spam traps from your subscription list is a part of the reactive strategy crucial to minimizing the aftermath of encountering harmful contacts. However, it is much better for the company to adopt a proactive strategy and prevent problem behavior from occurring in the first place. Here are the best practices you can introduce in your email marketing channel and digital presence to avoid spam traps.
Understand Spam Traps
Everything starts with theory and a thorough understanding of the root of the problem. When companies know about spam traps, how they work, and, most importantly, how they tend to appear on the mailing list, they may devise an effective proactive strategy. This knowledge helps them recognize vulnerabilities in their email practices and take steps to mitigate risks.
By introducing timely solutions to avoid email spam traps, they can protect their presence in the email channel, relationships with customers, and hard-earned reputation. Therefore, dive deep into spam traps and their origins, inspect your activity and strategy, and define areas for improvement.

Spam Traps (infographic by Glock Apps)
Follow Best Email Marketing Practices
Following the best practices in email marketing is the most effective proactive strategy you can adopt. As spam traps were created to fight not only malicious actors but also negligent businesses, staying on the “light” side is a time-proven way to protect yourself from honeypots.
It is also a way to build a strong reputation with the key participants of the ecosystem (such as ISPs and mailbox providers), who always encourage companies to behave appropriately in the channel and respect their clients by obeying laws and creating customer-centric campaigns. The better your reputation, the more ISPs and mailbox providers will tolerate your small mistakes like accidentally hitting spam traps.
Here are the principal recommendations
- Authenticate all your emails from informative blasts to win-over series.
- Obey regulations and international laws.
- Know your target audience’s current needs, pain points, preferences, and expectations.
- Collect zero-party data and conduct email campaigns with quizzes, polls, and surveys to get first-hand information.
- Listen to your audience and make unsubscription easy and fast.
- Segment your target audience.
- Determine the appropriate email cadence for each segment.
- Create hyper-personalized email content.
- Give subscribers compelling reasons to stay with your brand rather than bombarding them or pushing using poor incentives.
- Automate and employ AI to create personalized customer journeys.
- A/B test email campaigns.
Don’t forget to optimize email content. As one of the most fundamental components in email marketing, it stands behind every campaign, strategy, and eventual company’s success in the channel and client relationships. It must be polished and strengthened from all crucial aspects.
Besides creating hyper-personalized body copy or ensuring mobile-friendliness and accessibility, checking it against spam using Unspam is crucial. This professional email marketing instrument identifies issues that may cause emails to land in the spam folder, offering contextual advice to fix deliverability problems beforehand.
On top of that, it examines such critical aspects of your digital newsletter as authentication, list-unsubscribe header, accessibility, and IP and Domain blacklisting. These checks polish your digital correspondence, greatly contributing to your honest game in the email channel.

Unspam – professional email spam checker and deliverability test
Never Buy or Rent Email Lists
You have probably heard this once or twice, but we will stress it again: never buy or rent email lists. It is so tempting to double your client base overnight with just one deal. However, purchased email contacts always cause more harm than good.
Let us start with the fact that you violate international regulations and laws, risking getting a huge fine. Do you know that the GDPR can impose substantial financial penalties on those who send emails to recipients without explicit consent? This may result in fines of up to 4% of your global annual turnover.
You risk increasing the spam rate and spam complaint rate. You might get a bad reaction when you reach people not initially interested in your brand and product. After all, who does like uninvited and intrusive visitors in their already overloaded mailboxes? At a minimum, this causes frustration and irritation, resulting in your correspondence being sent to the spam folder.
You risk ruining your relationship with ISPs and mailbox providers. As your deliverability metrics will suffer, ISPs and mailbox providers will consider your correspondence suspicious. This means your chances of being rejected by ISPs and mailbox providers are increasing, especially during peak times when companies maximize their sending volumes.
Finally, most importantly, purchased lists are likely to have spam traps—not only recycled spam traps but, worse of all, pristine spam traps, as many third-party lists are usually collected by scripts or stolen. This easily ruins your sender’s score, brand reputation, and hard-earned positioning in the channel.
Introduce Double Opt-In Registration
Purchased contacts are not the only origin of spam traps in your mailing list. The prime source of fake and set-up contact addresses is your opt-in registration routine. Companies that practice single opt-in registration to get on board as many subscribers as possible almost guarantee to get spam traps. First, people may intentionally leave fake email addresses to open access to gated content and leave without strings attached. Second, spam bots may easily populate your email lists with lousy addresses. Finally, users may unintentionally leave an incorrect email.
Introducing and practicing permission-based email marketing is one of the fundamental ways to avoid spam traps. Collecting an email address only after sending a confirmation email to that address and receiving the user’s explicit consent ensures the address is not fake and that the person is genuinely interested in the brand.
A double opt-in routine guarantees the quality of acquired leads by bringing only valid email addresses from engaged prospects on board. Not only does the company avoid spam traps, but, most importantly, it ensures it has contacts waiting for their correspondence.
Moreover, it is crucial to note that double opt-in is the only way for a company to comply with regulations and international laws, which require businesses to get consent from their subscribers before sending any email to them.
When introducing a double opt-in routine, follow these simple tips:
- Reinforce your signup form with validation to prevent issues related to typos.
- Send a confirmation email right away.
- Make the confirmation process simple, straightforward, and quick.
- Ensure that consent is obtained for all critical digital correspondence.
Validate and verify new email addresses through professional software. These terms are often used interchangeably but are not the same. Email validation checks the correctness and format of the contact’s address, whereas email verification ensures that an actual person is behind each email address. Both of them are crucial for avoiding and getting rid of spam traps.

Clean Subscription Lists Regularly
Believe it or not, introducing double opt-in and avoiding shady dealers with freshly collected contact addresses is insufficient to protect your mailing list from spam traps. Though it might solve the biggest part of your problem, chances remain that you might encounter them. It is here where the regular cleaning of your subscription list might help reinforce your strategy.
Good list hygiene is the cornerstone of successful email marketing. It ensures the cleanliness of one of the most valuable marketing assets (quality leads and loyal brand fans). It offers numerous benefits, like improving key performance metrics or saving investment. Most importantly, it helps identify and eliminate malicious contact addresses that might be spam traps.
There will always be people who switch to different email addresses or become disengaged. Every subscription list has inactive subscribers and abandoned contact addresses that once were valid and legitimate.
Setting up a regular cadence of email list cleaning sorts this out. When companies systematically review their lists for inactive subscribers, duplicate addresses, invalid domains, and abandoned contacts, they increase their chances of removing spam traps from their lists.
Here are some tips to follow:
- Define the right email list hygiene frequency. Some companies perform email list cleaning every six months, while others need to do that more often.
- Stick to a cadence, whatever frequency you choose. However, revisit it to ensure it is relevant. Analyzing email engagement metrics provides crucial knowledge to determine whether you need to change your approach.
- Keep an eye on role accounts. While removing them from your list is highly recommended, you might still place them in an individual group and track their activity, deriving benefits from them while they are still active.
- Check whether you have addressed all unsubscribe requests.
- Segment your list accurately. Place contacts with spam complaints and devise a re-engagement strategy for them. If it does not work overtime, remove subscribers who consistently fail to engage with your content after a set period.
- Verify the subscription list.
- Use professional email list cleaning services. Whether you have a small or big collection of contact addresses, professional software will test them against multiple criteria, polishing the list from various aspects.
Monitor Key Email Performance Metrics – Hard Bounces, Soft Bounces, and Inactive Subscribers
One important step in introducing a proactive strategy for fighting spam traps is rigorously monitoring key email performance metrics. These metrics encompass multiple criteria, from inbox placement rate to spam complaints rate to click-to-open rate. These factors are important for companies to understand how well their campaigns and strategies perform in the channel.
However, when it comes to avoiding spam traps, you do not need to revisit all of them. Instead, you must focus on soft bounces, hard bounces, and email engagement, which indicate how well subscribers interact with your email marketing campaigns.
Start by analyzing bouncing notifications, which means your digital newsletter has not reached its destination. They could be soft and hard.
Soft bounces, as a rule, occur due to temporary problems. Your email could be too large or contain an unsupported type of attachment. Another common reason is that your subscriber has a full inbox or the server experiences downtime. In general, these contacts are left on the subscription list as they have the potential to reach their destination finally.
However, in some cases, soft bounces may indicate serious and, most importantly, permanent problems with the recipient’s inbox. This usually happens when the owner abandons the mailbox. Ultimately, these soft bounces turn into hard bounces, and email contacts might easily be recycled into spam traps. So, keeping a close eye on your soft bounces is highly recommended. If they happen too often, deleting them from the list is better.
Hard bounces are less vague but have more serious consequences. They happen for permanent reasons. For example, the email address is no longer valid or blocked by the recipient, so there is no chance to revive it. These bad contact addresses must be removed from your subscription list immediately.
Afterward, focus on email engagement and inactive subscribers. Soft and hard bounces are not the only ones that signal spam traps. Key criteria, such as the user’s interaction with your correspondence, also determine fake contacts. As spam traps do not belong to real people, emails sent to them will never be opened and interacted with. They will not show any engagement.
Therefore, analyze email engagement and locate inactive subscribers. Separate them into several groups depending on the period of their inactivity. It could be 3, 6, or even 9 and 12 months. This period varies because of the company’s strategy in the channel and the target audience’s needs and preferences. Run re-engagement campaigns. If they are ineffective, remove them from your subscription list, as they are at risk of being converted into dead address spam traps.
Conclusion
Whether pristine or recycled, spam traps significantly threaten companies capitalizing on email marketing. Not only do they bring the damage that ruins a company’s reputation and presence in the channel, but they are so tricky and canny that they may easily find their way to mailing lists of the most reputable and honest companies. Although no one is immune to them, there is a way to mitigate the risks of encountering them.
Companies are highly advised to adopt proactive strategies to avoid email spam traps. This implies using double opt-in, avoiding purchased contacts, regularly cleaning the subscription list, validating email addresses at the collection point, purging inactive contacts, following the best email marketing practices, and checking content against spam through Unspam.
These essential safeguarding steps help companies confidently navigate the email marketing landscape, steer clear of spam traps, and maximize the channel’s potential.