# `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
- Billing: 1 credit, like every deliverable or risky answer. Repeats of the same address are free for 7 days.

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.

```json
{
    "email": "former.employee@acme.com",
    "deliverable": "risky",
    "reason": "recycled_mailbox",
    "mailbox_exists": true,
    "previously_invalid": true,
    "previously_invalid_at": "2026-03-02",
    "risk_score": 30
}
```

Reference: https://spaw.co/docs/reasons/recycled_mailbox