Reputation
Spam traps: pristine, recycled, and typo traps
Three kinds of spam trap: pristine (never used by a human), recycled (abandoned mailboxes turned trap), and typo (common misspellings of real domains). Each tells the listing service something different about you.
Pristine traps
Addresses planted on websites or sold in fake lead lists to catch scraping and list-buying. Hitting a pristine trap means you bought or scraped a list — the listing services know this and react accordingly.
Recycled traps
Real mailboxes that were abandoned for ~12 months, deactivated by the provider, and re-activated as traps. Hitting recycled traps means your list is old and you don't suppress unengaged contacts.
Typo traps
Common misspellings of large domains (gmial.com, yahho.com). Hitting typo traps means you don't validate addresses at signup. Easy to fix with double-opt-in and an email validation step.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I find out which traps I'm hitting?
- You can't directly — listing services don't disclose trap addresses. But the type of listing (Spamhaus SBL vs PBL, Validity Sender Score drop, etc.) tells you which family you've hit.