A spam trap is not a grouchy subscriber. It is an address monitored by a blocklist or mailbox provider. Mail to that address is evidence you do not have permission, or that you ignore hygiene.
Pristine vs recycled traps
Pristine traps were never used by a human; they exist only to catch list appends and scrapes. Recycled traps used to belong to someone and were later converted after a long quiet period. The first type punishes purchased and scraped data. The second punishes mailing ancient files you never sunset.
How senders step on them
- Buying or appending emails.
- Scraping contact pages and GitHub profiles.
- Never removing hard bounces.
- Reactivating a five-year-old export “just this once”.
How to stay off them
Collect addresses yourself, confirm them, and remove persistent failures. Do not send to the full historical database because a new ESP made import easy. If a blocklist listing names trap hits, stop the campaign, audit the source of those recipients, and only resume on recently confirmed mail.
