Email Must-Knows: What’s a Pristine Spam Trap?

If you want to contact somebody over email, it’s a good rule of thumb to make sure that person actually exists. Otherwise, you may find your brand’s delivery reputation at the mercy of a pristine spam trap.

What’s the Difference Between a Pristine Spam Trap and Other Spam Traps?

Spam traps are essentially dummy email addresses, ones that no sensible sender should be targeting, and they’re used by internet service providers (ISPs), inbox providers, and security companies to identify and blocklist emails from potential spam senders.

A pristine spam trap is an email address that was never a real email address in the first place. Instead, it’s an address that was set up by an email provider or security company for the sole purpose of catching spammers. [email protected] might sound like a real email address, but be smart: Nobody’s ever typed that sequence of words before.

The beauty of a pristine spam trap is that it’s meant to catch senders targeting email addresses and domains known to be 100% fake.

How Do Brands End Up Caught in Pristine Spam Traps?

How did that particular address end up in your hands? There’s a good chance its origin is an email list that’s been rented or purchased, giving an organization access to a list of fresh prospects. Acquiring or borrowing email lists is a poor practice; rather than a list of genuine contacts interested in your product or service, it’s someone else’s list of people interested in someone else’s product. (In some countries, there’s also legislation against carrying out this practice.)

Staying out of pristine spam traps is essential to ensuring your messages get delivered. To avoid the most obvious ways into one, never purchase or borrow email lists. But as a best practice, it’s worth setting up a double opt-in email to ensure your list is populated with subscribers that have expressed a clear interest in being reached. It’s also worthwhile to sunset email addresses that are more than six months old to avoid falling into other types of spam traps.

Anything Else?

To reach customers’ inboxes without relying on spammy tactics, Braze’s email platform allows companies to send dynamic messages that stand out among the clutter. Explore how Braze can lead to an 8x increase in email engagement on the Braze Email Product Page.