Spam traps are email addresses that don’t belong to real recipients. A spam trap either never belonged to a real recipient, or did but was closed and rejected with a hard bounce error code stating the email address was bad or inactive for a significant period before being repurposed into a spam trap. They are used by ISPs and blacklists to track email spammers.
Spam traps fail into two separate types: recycled email addresses, and email addresses that never existed (honeypots). Let’s take a look at some of the similarities and differences between the two.