As an email marketer, it’s essential to be aware of different factors and traps that can negatively affect your sender reputation—one of them is being caught in honeypot email addresses.

While they act as legitimate email addresses, sending an email to a honeypot address will likely damage your reputation with internet service providers (ISPs), making your email marketing efforts futile.

This guide will go in-depth on honeypot email addresses, how they can get into your email list, and the difference between spam traps and honeypot addresses. We’ll also go through how they can affect legitimate email senders and tips on avoiding honeypot emails.

Read on to know more.

What is an Email Honeypot?

Email honeypots are anti-spam traps that catch spammers or senders with poor contact management practices. Similar to real-life honeypots that lure animals, email honeypots are configured by ISPs and email service providers as legitimate email addresses to identify spammers and place them on their blacklists.

Besides catching malicious actors, honeypot email addresses usually catch senders with poor email list management and marketers actively using a bought mailing list for their email campaigns.

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Honeypots can also target bots that input fake email addresses into an email address collection form, hackers that harvest email addresses from web pages and subdomains, and ones that collect personal information like phone numbers and bank information.

Illustration of a person standing beside a laptop with code on the screen. The code is magnified to reveal a bug icon, symbolizing software debugging and avoiding Email Honeypots.

Six Common Types of Honeypot Emails

To effectively catch spammers, honeypot emails come in different forms depending on their use case. Here are six types of honeypot addresses that you might encounter online:

  • Email Honeypots: These are dummy or inactive email addresses used to receive malicious messages from spammers. Cybersecurity teams collect these suspicious emails for production and research purposes. While production honeypots are used to check vulnerabilities on a network, research honeypots are used by government agencies to reveal a spammer’s methods and tactics.
  • High-Interaction Honeypots: These are complex honeypot systems that waste a spammer’s time so the cybersecurity team can analyze their acts and check vulnerabilities within the network.
  • Low-Interaction Honeypots – These honeypot addresses are the least complex and give an attacker limited access to your decoy operating system (OS). It emulates a small amount of internet protocols and network services—usually Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP)—just enough to deceive the attacker.
  • Spam Honeypots: Spam honeypots trap spammers using fake data that appear valuable for their acts. These can also trap legitimate email senders with poor list management and bad sending practices. Use our Email Spam Checker to learn your spam score and what it takes to avoid the spam folder.
  • Database Honeypots: As a part of protecting databases, these honeypot traps are used to attract attacks and catch hackers with decoy databases.
  • Client Honeypots: A client or server honeypot is used to lure suspicious servers that hackers utilize when attacking other servers. Cybersecurity teams use this to watch how a hacker modifies the client during an attack.

What are the Risks of Getting Caught in a Honeypot Trap?

If you’re a business owner or an email marketer, the risks of getting caught on spam traps and honeypot email addresses are real. One of the biggest issues when you accidentally send emails to these addresses is being identified as a spammer. This will put your sender’s reputation at risk, leading to low email deliverability on your marketing emails or getting blacklisted on various mailbox service providers.

Hands typing on a laptop displaying a popup with the word "Spam" in red text helping prevent email traps and avoid email honeypots effectively.

Your domain can also be affected if you apply unsafe email collection practices. Overall, getting caught in honeypot addresses can cause massive damage to your email marketing campaigns by damaging your sender reputation, resulting in your emails not reaching their intended recipients or landing them in spam.

What is the Difference Between Spam Traps and Honeypot Email Addresses?

While both terms are used interchangeably nowadays, spam traps and honeypot email addresses have distinct differences:

Spam Trap

A spam trap is an invalid or fake email address repurposed by an ISP or email service provider to catch spammers and legitimate senders with poor sending methods. Unlike honeypot emails, spam trap addresses are easy to detect using email list cleaning software and deliverability tools. ISPs also redeploy old email addresses as spam traps and closely monitor their activity for unsolicited emails.

To learn more, you can read our guide on checking if an email address is still active and valid.

Email Honeypot

Email honeypots are email addresses created by ISPs and anti-spam platforms to bait spammers. Sending one of these emails will almost always label you as a spammer and will get your address blocked by mailbox providers. Honeypots can be placed on company web pages to lure out individuals who use email scraping tools and block those who send them.

Compared to a spam trap, honeypot addresses don’t have to exist and have a dedicated mailbox; trappers can check their activity for attempted email sends and identify those email senders. Email honeypots are also relatively complex to detect, and any legitimate email sender can be trapped in one, greatly affecting their sender reputation.

How a Honeypot Email Address Can Get Into Your Mailing List

Here are two main ways that a honeypot email address can find its way to your mailing lists:

Using Web Scraping Tools

Web scrapers use bots to crawl websites and extract data for lead generation, email scraping, market research, and other related tasks. While scraping email addresses may seem efficient, it’s a bad idea since it directly puts you at risk of acquiring honeypot emails. Once you’ve sent emails to these addresses without consent, there’s a high chance of getting your emails marked as spam or blacklisted by ISPs.

Illustration of a software window with colored code lines and a blue beetle sitting on the screen, symbolizing a bug in the software. This highlights the importance to avoid email honeypots in your code.

Purchasing Email Lists

Purchased lists are always a bad idea for email marketing since they rarely assure you that emails in the list have consented to receiving marketing content, automatically violating GDPR compliance policies. Because these email addresses are random and likely don’t involve your target audience, you’ll have low email deliverability and open rates on your marketing emails. They can also contain email honeypots, which will damage your sender’s reputation.

Valid email lists are hard to come by and are usually not for sale, so it’s still practical to acquire a legitimate subscriber organically through single or double opt-ins.

4 Tips to Avoid Honeypot Email Addresses

Now that you know everything about honeypots and how they can potentially disrupt your email marketing efforts, here are four effective tips so you can avoid them:

Avoid Buying Email Lists

While you may think that it’s a cheap and quick way of building your mailing list, using purchased lists is a terrible idea and can cause your address to be blocked by ISPs. Instead, try building mailing lists organically through a double opt-in system, ensuring you consent with all your subscribers.

This way, you will likely gain high-quality prospects and have high email deliverability. You could also segment your contacts for targeted campaigns, allowing you to create personalized content and receive more engagements.

Apply a Bot-Proof Double Opt-In Process

To have a quality prospect database, you must employ an effective double opt-in process that ensures you’ll have a legitimate email address and not bots. Compared to a single opt-in, where you can immediately add a contact to your list, double opt-ins contain an extra step (usually with a confirmation link) to confirm their subscription. This eliminates the risk of incorrect email addresses and ensures that you’ll have engaged subscribers.

Illustration of an open envelope alongside a subscription form with an email input and submit button. Text reads "subscribe, get more from us and avoid email honeypots for better email security.

You can add reCAPTCHA on your website forms to prevent a spam bot from entering invalid email information. Double opt-in also ensures you comply with data protection laws when collecting email addresses and sending marketing communications.

Monitor Your Email Deliverability

Access to key email campaign metrics, like email deliverability, is essential to determine your campaign’s success. It helps you check how many emails are successfully delivered, bounced, or flagged as spam. It’s also necessary to monitor the number of your hard-bounced emails and their causes; whether you’ve sent emails to fake or inactive addresses or your address has been blacklisted, it’s a clear sign that you’re caught by a honeypot address.

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Maintain a Clean Email List

To effectively avoid honeypot emails, it’s essential to follow the best email hygiene practices, which include ensuring that your list only contains valid and engaged email addresses. When you send emails every week, ensure to remove inactive subscribers who have not engaged with your emails within the last three months. You can also establish re-engagement campaigns for dormant subscribers and remove them if they’re still unresponsive.

We generally recommend you clean your email list every six months. However, list cleaning can be more frequent for email marketers with an extensive subscriber list (over 100,000). To know more, read our guide on how to clean an email list to reduce bounce rates.

A person using a computer to check their email inbox, ensuring they avoid Email Honeypots

Final Thoughts

Honeypot email addresses are possibly one of the biggest challenges in your email marketing campaigns. You can get them through purchased email lists or web crawlers that scrape email addresses. Sending to honeypot traps can also diminish your sender reputation, causing poor email deliverability or your domain to be blacklisted.

However, you can mitigate the risks of having honeypots on your lists by building your email list organically, maintaining proper email hygiene, and applying double opt-in on your web subscription forms.

To have a fully clean mailing list for your campaigns, consider an email deliverability tool like InboxAlly. Our platform has effective email list verification tools, providing a clean, verified list to avoid wasting resources on invalid addresses, have better engagements, and protect your sender reputation.

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