Many of our clients are confused and even irritated about the fact that how there IP address got added to the blacklist or why their mailing which was performing well yesterday is now getting rejections from ISPs today? It is brought to our attention that many people don’t know precisely about “spam traps” and “honey pots”. So today we are trying to solve the doubts about them. Generally rejections from ISPs occur due to several emails sent to inactive recipients and those inactive email addresses may be spam traps or honeypots. They can bring down positive reputation of IP address to dust more quickly than anything.

These are the email addresses that do not own by real people. A spam trap either never belonged to an actual recipient, or did but was shut down and rejected with a higher percentage of hard bounces with was non-active for a significant time interval before being repurposed into a spam trap. They are used by blacklists and ISPs to monitor email spammers.

People generally use honeypot and spamtrap as synonyms but they are different from each other in many ways. Spam traps are divided into two category types: reprocessed email addresses, and email addresses that never persisted (honeypots). Let’s take a look at some of the resemblances and variations between the two.

Spam Traps
Spam traps are those email addresses which were active and belonged to a real person at one point but now reused after being shut down. The ISP starts sending you hard bounce error, if you deliver to a constantly inactive email address after a certain time frame. Mailers should add these inactive email addresses to suppression lists because.

After a few weeks, months or sometimes after years of inactivity, these email addresses will be activated again and monitored to see if new emails are being sent to these addresses. Since they should not be getting emails, mailers who did not suppressed these email addresses or have started resending to these addresses again will be knocked for sending to these kinds of spam traps.

Honeypots
Honeypots are created particularly to catch spammers by ISPs. Since there is no genuine way that a honeypot e-mail address with could have been used to subscribe for a list, sending to honeypots is seemed upon as really bad and can cause serious deliverability problems.

So, how do mailers even get these “fake” email addresses? Generally, these honeypots end up in mailers’ list and database when they either purchase, or rent list from a third person or “harvest” emails, by using software to crawl Websites and other resources for email addresses. Both techniques are unsuccessful and even illegal because they can also lead to CAN-SPAM issues.

So the basic difference between a spamtrap and a honeypot is that honeypot email addresses are intentionally created to catch spammers they never been belonged to any real human being and spamtraps are just the old recycled email addresses which are reactivated for the same purpose as honeypot.