What is a spam trap?
Also called: honeypot, pristine trap, recycled trap
A spam trap is an email address that exists only to catch senders with poor list practices. It is never used by a person and never opts in, so any mail arriving at it proves the sender scraped, guessed or bought the address. Hitting one can get a sending domain blocklisted immediately.
There are two kinds. Pristine traps are addresses published quietly on web pages purely to catch scrapers — they have never belonged to anyone. Recycled traps are formerly real addresses, abandoned long enough for the provider to reactivate them as monitors, which is what happens to a list you bought two years ago and never cleaned.
Verification cannot reliably identify a spam trap, and any vendor claiming to detect them with certainty is overstating it. A trap accepts mail exactly like a real mailbox, because appearing real is the entire design.
What verification does do is remove the conditions traps thrive in: invalid addresses, stale records and scraped data. The defence is permission and recency, not detection.
Last reviewed 2026-09-11