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Is it possible to identify spam-trap emails accurately; from the email database?

I came across few email verifiers, claiming to detect and remove spam-trap email accounts but how do they detect them? As per my knowledge spam emails in some cases does look like valid accounts.

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6 Answers

Tamas Szabo
Tamas Szabo - Best Answer answered 5 years ago

Can SPAM traps be removed by email verifiers?

No, spam traps are one of the highest value assets for Internet Service Providers. They will never publish, share, leak or sell the list of their spam traps. If they did, it will not be used for performance tracking any more.

Do you believe in fairy tales?

If you do, that’s fine. But be aware, if an email verifier offers you to remove spam traps from your email lists, they are misleading you. Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, and any other ISP’s are fighting against spam. Spam traps are their best tool in order to identify a spammer. Believe me none of these ISP’s went to a little “company” in somewhere in the world, and handed them their most precious lists.If SPAM traps were publicly available, they wouldn’t work anymore. No Internet Service Provider will ever share their spam traps with any email verifier, because it is against their business principles.

How to avoid spam traps?

  1. Send emails to opt-in subscribers only. If you send emails to real subscribers you will never have a honey pot on your list.
  2. Never rent, purchase a list, or collect email addresses from the internet for bulk email sending. It is illegal in most countries, and when you send out your email list, you will be caught anyway.
  3. Monitor subscribers’ activity and remove inactive subscribers. Follow best subscriber management practices, keep emailing your email lists regularly and remove subscribers who never interact (open, click a link, reply) with your email.

Follow these 3 septs above and you will never have to think about spam traps any more.

Use HuBuCo email verification to make sure your emails are valid. No B.S. HuBuCo is the best email verifier.

Marcus G.
Marcus G. answered 1 year ago

Spam-trap emails are email addresses that are specifically designed to catch spam. Organizations or individuals usually set them up to track down spammers.

Spam traps are not visible on any website, and legitimate users or genuine email senders never get into the spam trap.

Only spammers use crawlers to extract email addresses from different websites and sell to other organizations or marketers to form money. But unfortunately, most crawlers can never distinguish between real, genuine, and spam traps. And they find themselves storing all the spam traps within their email list and selling as leads in the marketplaces.

For your question: Is it possible to identify spam-trap emails accurately; from the email database?

I have an answer.

And it will be YES; technically, you can identify spam traps using email verification tools if emails are...

  1. Consist of Spam keywords
  2. Email typos
  3. Dormant email addresses (Blacklisted by DNSBLs and URI DNSBLs)
  4. Invalid or Mailbox does not exist

But, if the email passes all these functionalities, it doesn't ensure it's not a spam trap.

Various email verification tools ensure the removal of spam traps.

Here's the list:

ZeroBounce: Their abuse/spam trap detection feature removes known email complainers and spam traps from your list.

MyEmailVerifier: Removes spam traps from your list.

Bouncer: Yes, it removes spam traps within toxicity check (complainers, litigators, or potential spam traps)

EmailListVerify: Provides spam-trap detection and other verifications.

You can deeply compare them here.

I'm not recommending but if you don't want to use email verification, look for signs that the email address is invalid or fake to identify a spam-trap email address. These include misspellings, incorrect domain names, and random characters. If you suspect an email address is a spam trap, do not add it to your mailing list.

Donald Vizcaino
Donald Vizcaino answered 5 years ago

Although its impossible to detect all Spam-traps, ZeroBounce has proprietary technology that allows us to detect most spam-traps as well as using feeds from Spam- trap crowdsourced networks such as abusix.com

Greg Jordan
Greg Jordan answered 5 years ago

Hi I would advise caution using an email verification company that claims it can detect spam traps, spam traps are genuine email addresses and are specifically designed to not be detected!You only find this out once you send an email to that address. At Email Checker we do not offer spam trap detection, what we do offer is that we pre screen data against a list of known harmful address and known spam traps and if this is detected in a clients list then we flag this to advise clients not to email to these addresses.

You can find out more and sign up for a free account with EmailChecker and you also get 100 free credits so you can test our solutions for yourself.

-1

The short answer is No; Despite email validation services like DeBounce being able to detect spam traps, they have no guarantee for finding all available spam traps in your list because this is not possible technically.

Joey Lockwood
Joey Lockwood answered 5 years ago

No, Spam trap information changes to frequently for any email verification company to be able to track accurately. If you are having issues with spam traps, you may want to check out this article here: https://blog.datavalidation.com/5-ways-to-overcome-the-spam-blues/