What spam traps are, why they hurt your sender reputation, and what Kawaa can and cannot tell you about them.
What are spam traps?
Spam traps are email addresses used by ISPs and anti-spam organizations to identify senders with poor list hygiene. Types include:
Pristine traps
Addresses that were never used by real people. They're created specifically to catch scrapers and purchased lists.
Recycled traps
Old, abandoned email addresses repurposed as traps. They catch senders who don't clean their lists.
Typo traps
Common misspellings of popular domains (e.g., gmial.com, yahooo.com).
Consequences of hitting spam traps
- Immediate blacklisting
- Severely damaged sender reputation
- Emails sent to spam across all recipients
- Potential account suspension by ESPs
How Kawaa handles spam traps
Trap operators keep their trap addresses and domains secret, precisely so that no pattern can find them. So Kawaa does not guess:
- A built-in list of known spam-trap domains: an address gets the
spam_trapstatus only when its domain is on this list, which holds only domains reviewed as existing solely to catch senders. It has no entries today: no public source names such a domain. - An address that only looks like a trap, such as
sample@orblackhole@, or one at a domain whose name contains “test” or “bounce”, is checked with the mail server like any other address, and its status is what the server says. - Typo domain detection: misspellings of the big mailbox providers, such as gmial.com, are flagged as likely typos with a suggested correction rather than treated as traps
Kawaa keeps no catalogue of known trap addresses: the check reads a fixed list, not a database that grows over time. A verification result, including the address and its status, is stored with your verification history for your plan’s retention period. A trap that looks like an ordinary address on an ordinary domain is not something any verifier can see, which is why a clean result lowers the risk rather than ruling it out.