There’s a lot of avoiding spam traps going on behind the scenes to protect your inbox from spam. Internet Service Providers, anti-spam organizations and domain blocklisting services all maintain their own army of spam traps which they use to identify email senders who aren’t using best practices. Getting your emails to end up in these honeypots (aka spam traps) is bad for your reputation and can lead to your sending IP address being blocked entirely. Fortunately, it’s easy to avoid spam traps by following simple best practices.

The Hidden Dangers of Recycled Spam Traps: What Email Marketers Need to Know

Avoiding spam traps starts with understanding what they are. Essentially, they’re fake email addresses that are set up to catch spammers. These email addresses can be purchased from a list broker, collected through a poorly managed signup form or are the result of poor list hygiene practices.

Whether they’re pristine or recycled, hitting a spam trap will hurt your sender score and reputation over time. It’s an indication that you weren’t practicing responsible list building and didn’t take the time to clean your lists of disengaged or inactive users.

Spam traps are difficult to spot since they look just like real email addresses. However, a good way to identify them is to segment your list by user engagement, looking for inactive or unused email addresses. You can also prevent these emails from being sent to your subscribers by securing any signup forms with reCAPTCHA and only purchasing contact lists that have been cleaned at least once a year.