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recycled_mailbox

The mailbox exists now, but once answered that it did not

The handshake confirmed the mailbox today, and an earlier handshake had it rejected as non-existent. A mailbox that was dead and lives again is the shape of a recycled address — the spam-trap kind included.

appears in
reason
verdict
risky
risk weight
+30
credits
1 credit, like every deliverable or risky answer. Repeats of the same address are free for 7 days.

What it means

Mailbox providers and blocklist operators turn abandoned addresses into traps: an address that bounced for a year starts accepting mail again, and whoever still sends to it is a sender who never cleans a list. Spaw remembers a definitive "no such mailbox" answer for a year under a keyed hash of the address, and when a later probe says the mailbox exists it reports previously_invalid true with the date in previously_invalid_at.

The verdict is risky with reason recycled_mailbox and the weight of 30, the medium band on its own; mailbox_exists is true, because it is. previously_invalid is false for a confirmed mailbox with no such history and null whenever the mailbox is not confirmed. The memory is erased with the address on an erasure request.

What to do

Do not send from a list-cleaning run. A recycled address is a real mailbox that may be a trap, so treat it as you would a catch-all: hold it, and only send once the person has re-engaged through another channel.

Example response 

{
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "deliverable": "risky",
    "reason": "recycled_mailbox",
    "mailbox_exists": true,
    "previously_invalid": true,
    "previously_invalid_at": "2026-03-02",
    "risk_score": 30
}

Abbreviated: a real answer carries all 46 fields, listed in the verify-email reference.

Related

markdown version: /docs/reasons/recycled_mailbox.md