Spam trap

An email address no real person uses, kept by a mailbox provider or a blocklist operator to catch senders with poor list practices.

Pristine traps never signed up for anything, so mail to them means the address was scraped or bought. Recycled traps are old addresses that bounced for a long time and were later turned back on to catch senders who never removed them. Typo traps sit at misspelled versions of popular domains. Hitting traps can put a sending domain or IP on a blocklist, and no list check can find them, because they look like any other address.

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Related terms

Hard bounce: A permanent delivery failure: the address or its domain does not exist or refuses mail.
Catch-all domain: A domain whose mail server accepts mail for any address, so a check before sending cannot tell whether a mailbox really exists.
Role address: An address for a function rather than a person, such as info@, sales@ or support@, often read by several people or a ticket system.

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