Glossary
Spam trap
A spam trap is an email address that real people do not use, kept by a mailbox provider or a blocklist operator to catch senders who mail addresses they should not.
Why it matters when you send from your own Gmail
Traps are typically of two kinds: addresses that never belonged to a person and were published for scrapers to find, and old addresses that were abandoned and later reused as traps. Mailing one signals a careless list, and the consequences land on the sending domain or mailbox. From your own Gmail, the defence is the same as for bounces: write only to addresses you have a reason to think are in use, stop at the first hard bounce, and never revive an old list without checking it.
Example
You buy a list of 20,000 addresses collected years ago and send to all of them. A few were abandoned long ago, and one of those is now a trap. Your next emails start landing in spam.
What to do
Use addresses you found on the company's own site or have other good reason to think are live. Skip bought lists, and skip addresses that bounced before, even if a new tool offers them again.
Related terms
All terms are on the glossary.