Deliverability
Pristine Spam Trap
An email address that was never used for legitimate purposes, created solely to catch spammers.
Definition
A pristine spam trap is an email address that was never used for legitimate communication and exists solely to catch spammers. These addresses are seeded on websites or hidden in forms where only automated scraping tools would find them. Hitting a pristine trap is strong evidence of list purchasing or scraping and severely damages sender reputation.
Pro Tip
The only way to avoid pristine traps is to never buy lists or scrape websites for email addresses.