# Recycled spam trap

A recycled spam trap is a real mailbox that was abandoned, bounced as unknown for a period, and was then reactivated by its provider to catch senders who never removed it.

Date: 2026-09-13

A recycled spam trap is a real mailbox that its owner abandoned, that the provider then rejected as unknown for months, and that the provider switched back on purely to see who still sends to it. Nobody reads it; a message arriving there proves the sender ignored the bounces or never sent at all during the dead period, which is why recycled traps carry the most weight with the operators who keep them.

## What Spaw answers

The shape is exactly what `previously_invalid` reports: a mailbox that answered "no such mailbox" earlier — to the handshake, or in a bounce you reported whose reason read as user unknown — and answers yes now. The date of the last not-found rides in `previously_invalid_at`, the verdict is `risky` with the reason `recycled_mailbox`, and the `recycled_mailbox` weight of 30 applies. The memory is kept for a year under a keyed hash of the address.

## What it does not mean

A mailbox that revives is not always a trap: a company rehires, a person reopens an account. The signal says the address was dead and came back, and that adding it to a campaign on the strength of one fresh confirmation is exactly the mistake a recycled trap exists to catch.

Reference: https://spaw.co/glossary/recycled-spam-trap