Spamtraps come in many flavors and colors

At Cloudmark, we make use of email feedback in numerous forms to help determine what mail is and isn't spam. Some of that feedback comes in the form of spamtraps (sometimes also referred to as honeypots) and the way those spamtraps were created can vary, resulting in different issues for a sender to consider. Over on the Word to the Wise blog, Laura has recently posted a useful guide to spamtraps, highlighting the different ways that an email address can be become a spamtrap, and what it means for the sender. When we deal with senders who are hitting spamtraps, often there is a lack of understanding on quite what a spamtrap is, and how it managed to end up on their lists. For senders running confirmed (or 'double') opt-in subscription lists, their troubles tend to come from poorly managed list hygiene programs which either don't age out unresponsive recipients or don't pay attention to SMTP error logs which might indicate a problem. These will come under the Dead address and Dead domain traps headings. A good real world example of 'not doing the right thing' here is a domain that I registered many years ago and had used for a while, including signing up to receive newsletters from a well-known UK-based tech goods store. At some point, I decided to stop paying for and using that domain, and so for about 5 years the domain lay dormant, until I decided that I wanted it again. Within days of getting the MX records setup, I started to receive these same newsletters once more, to the same address. Now, it is possible that in those 5 years, someone also registered that domain and starting accepting mail to said address but it is unlikely (since the domain is an obscure phonetic word, and I also don't get any mail for any other user at it currently). The takeaway from this? Make sure that in addition to regularly aging out older and unresponsive recipients, that you're also looking at the technical angle and checking the email error logs for non-existant mailboxes and domains. Most reputable ESPs will have some mechanism for handling both parts of this for you.