Spam trap
An address run by anti-spam operators to catch people who mail bad or stolen lists — hitting one hurts reputation.
Say it out loud
“An address that exists only to catch people mailing lists they should not have. Hitting one is a data problem, not a sending problem.”
Spam traps are not customers. Pristine traps were never real users and were published to be harvested; recycled traps were once real addresses, abandoned, and turned into traps after a long silence. A hit tells you something about where your addresses came from, or about how long you have kept mailing the dead.
A single large import with one timestamp is the signature of a list that was bought, scraped or merged from somewhere unaccountable.
This is the tell. A dead address bounces. An address that accepts everything and reacts to nothing for six years is not a person.
Which means a sunset policy is not hygiene theatre — it is the actual defence.
Yours
Nobody does this for you.
What goes wrong
Chasing delisting after a blocklist hit without changing where addresses come from. Delisting removes the symptom; the same import will produce the same hit next quarter.
What people get told
The claim. “You can buy a list of spam traps and remove them.”
Actually. The addresses are secret by design — publishing them would defeat the entire mechanism. Anyone selling a trap list is selling you something else. The only defence is where addresses come from and how quickly you stop mailing silence.
The dated rules behind this
A definition is not a citation. These are the pages with the primary source, the date it was published, and what to do about it.
See also
Where this sits
Stop 6, the verdict lands. The message goes to an inbox, a spam folder, a refusal, or an address that was never a person.