How to remove spam traps are email addresses that have no real-life person behind them and can do serious damage to your sender reputation. However, the good news is that there are several steps you can take to remove these traps from your list and avoid them in the future.

How to Remove Spam Traps

Unlike pristine spam traps, recycled spam traps are not as severe and may not affect your sender score as much. These are created by mailbox providers after a specific email address has a long period of inactivity without a valid login. These addresses are typically created after 3-9 months of inactivity, but they can also be created if an email is added to a list after it bounces.

Removing Spam Traps: Essential Techniques for Improved Email Deliverability and Reputation Management

The most important thing you can do to prevent spam traps from infiltrating your list is to follow best practices and proactively manage your contact list. This means identifying unengaged subscribers as soon as possible and sending them win-back campaigns to get them to engage with your emails and content.

Another important best practice is to use email verification tools to automatically reject abuse, misspelled and catch-all types of email addresses that can harm your reputation. These tools are easy to incorporate into your signup forms and verify the legitimacy of subscriber email addresses in real-time.

How to Avoid Pristine Spam Traps

Pristine spam traps are created by mailbox and blocklist providers when they discover senders who have collected email addresses illegally or from suspicious sources such as purchasing lists and scraping websites for email addresses. These email addresses have never been registered to an end subscriber or given out through a business card. They can be acquired through any number of suspicious list acquisition methods such as list purchase, renting or website scraping.