Spamtraps, a danger to the deliverability of your emails

We have spoken on numerous occasions of the importance of the prevent our emails from arriving in the spam folder. In this post we will talk about the spamtraps, tools used by email providers to identify those who send unsolicited email to users who have not requested to receive email from that sender.


When we analyse our Email Marketing campaigns, we can often find that the deliverability of our emails is low. This can be caused by different factors, but one of them may be that we have spamtrap emails in our database. These spamtraps can have repercussions on our reputation, affect our domains and even lead to us ending up in the blacklist if our IPs are blocked.
How do these traps end up in our database?
Inactive database addresses are often used. This means that when a list is not being actively and constantly managed, it contains obsolete addresses that should no longer be part of the database and continue to receive information that they should not. These same emails are the ones that can become spamtraps. They can also be found in purchased databases, which you do not have full control over which users are active and which are not.
Thus, there are two types of spamtraps:

• Pure Spamtraps: accounts created especially to capture spammers.
• Recycled Spamtraps: obsolete DB accounts that are taken over by mail providers after a certain period of inactivity or disuse.

How can these spamtraps be prevented from affecting the deliverability of our emails?
First and foremost, it is check, detect and clean the DB to locate those accounts that have no activity. It is very important that you do this on a regular basis to ensure that you have an active 100% database. If you have very old accounts or accounts that have not had any interaction with our communications for a long time, it is likely that these accounts have become booby-trapped emails.
Once you have a clean database, the chances that you will have spamtraps are very low. However, another very effective way to confirm accounts and avoid fake emails is to use the double opt-in as a registration policy. This way you will make sure that the users who receive your emails, receive them because they are really interested in what you can tell them.
The worst thing you can do, if you don't want to fall into some spamtrapis to buy databases. It is very likely that if you do so, you will have a list of accounts that are old, inactive or even contain fake emails. In addition, many of the accounts that will receive your communications are not opt-in addresses, which means that these accounts have not given their explicit consent to receive your communications and your emails will probably end up in the spam folder.