Pristine spam traps  also known as honeypot spam traps, are an email address that has never been used by a real person. These traps are created by mailbox providers and anti-spam organizations to identify senders who use poor list-building practices such as scraping websites or purchasing contact lists.

These pristine traps are embedded in web pages, and when spammers scrape these sites to build their contact lists, they often unknowingly pick up the spam trap in the process. Similarly, many purchased or rented contact lists contain pristine traps. If your brand lands on a pristine trap, it can negatively affect your sender reputation, decrease your deliverability rate over time, and result in your domain or IP address getting blacklisted.

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Recycled spam traps, on the other hand, are old email addresses that were once valid but have since been abandoned and repurposed by their provider to catch email marketers who don’t follow email best practices. These contacts are typically role email addresses (sales@, info@, support@) or old domain registrations. Recycled spam traps aren’t as harmful as pristine traps but can still damage your sender reputation over time, particularly if you’re emailing them frequently.

Whether it’s a pristine or recycled trap, any hit on one of these traps is a sign that your contact list is not healthy and needs to be cleaned up. To do this, you can implement an email validation check on your website or verify your lists before importing them to your ESP. While hitting a trap is not ideal, Constant Contact’s Lead Gen & CRM compliance specialists work with you to provide improvement recommendations and help you get back on track.