Spam trap
A spam trap is an email address operated by mailbox providers and blocklist operators specifically to catch senders with poor list hygiene. There's no real person behind it, so any mail it receives indicates you're emailing addresses you didn't earn permission to contact.
How it works
Pristine traps are addresses never used by a human; recycled traps are old abandoned addresses reactivated as traps. Hitting either tells providers your list is scraped or stale.
Why it matters
Spam-trap hits can land your domain on blocklists (e.g. Spamhaus) and tank deliverability across all your mail, not just the offending campaign.
How Autocloz handles it
Autocloz's pre-send email verification removes invalid and risky addresses, and suppression of bounces/non-engagers reduces the stale-address exposure that produces trap hits.
FAQ
How do I avoid spam traps?
Never buy or scrape lists, verify addresses before sending, remove long-term non-engagers, and suppress hard bounces. Traps are almost always a list-hygiene problem.
Related terms
Email bounce rate is the percentage of sent emails that are returned undelivered. Hard bounces are permanent (invalid or non-existent address); soft bounces are temporary (full mailbox, server down). A high bounce rate signals a poor list and damages sender reputation.
Email verification is the process of checking whether an email address is valid and safe to send to — confirming the syntax, domain and mailbox exist and aren't a known trap or disposable address — before you add it to a campaign. It is the single most effective way to control bounce rate.
Cold email deliverability is the share of your outbound cold emails that actually reach the recipient's inbox (not spam, not blocked). It depends on domain authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), sender reputation, mailbox warmup, list hygiene and content — not just whether the email was 'sent'.
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) is an email standard that tells receiving mail servers what to do with messages that fail SPF or DKIM checks — and sends you reports. It prevents spoofing of your domain and is now effectively required by Gmail and Yahoo for bulk senders.