---
title: "Email Must Knows: What's an Email Honey Pot?"
description: "Because honeypots are dispersed across the internet at random, it’s essential to practice good data hygiene. But what is a honeypot and how can you identify one?"
canonical_url: "https://www.braze.com/resources/articles/email-must-knows-whats-an-email-honey-pot"
language: "en-US"
datePublished: "2020-01-10T11:00:00-05:00"
publisher: "Braze"
tags:
  - "Email Must-Knows"
  - "Email"
---

# Email Must Knows: What's an Email Honey Pot?

In countless books and cartoons, a certain beloved bear continually places himself in difficult predicaments in his pursuit of honey, often falling out of tree branches and succumbing to bee attacks as a result. Even though he’s just trying to get what he wants, pots filled with delicious honey aren’t always what they seem or easy to obtain.

**Enter the Honeypot: What They Are and How to Avoid Them**

A honeypot—a term that appears to [originate from those children’s stories](http://academickids.com/encyclopedia/index.php/Honeypot)—plays off this dynamic to describe a key tool for reputational data services (think the [Spamhaus Project](https://www.spamhaus.org/) or [Cloudmark](https://www.cloudmark.com/en)) looking to identify spammers and other bad actors. Through a decoy email address that, by design, looks like any other perfectly deliverable email address, a honeypot acts as bait, attracting senders targeting lists that were most likely purchased or shared.

Because a honeypot will never open an email, click an email or do anything that a real human being would do when presented with a new email in their inbox, honeypots are a powerful resources for determining that messages sent to the decoy address are undoubtedly coming from spammers.

Because honeypots are dispersed across the internet at random, it’s essential to [practice good data hygiene](https://www.braze.com/resources/articles/email-marketing-campaign-best-practices). Acquiring an email list or relying on outdated contacts risks having your messages delivered to honeypot addresses, compromising your email deliverability and potentially jeopardizes your sender reputation. To [follow data hygiene best practices](https://www.braze.com/resources/articles/sneak-your-way-into-the-inbox), always require opt-in messages to ensure recipients want to receive communications, sunset old email addresses after six months of inactivity and develop your own email lists without purchasing addresses from other sources.

**Anything Else?**

To learn more about how Braze can support smart, relevant email messaging experiences, check out our [Email Product Page](https://www.braze.com/product/cross-channel-personalization/channels-platforms/email).

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*Published 2020-01-10T11:00:00-05:00 · canonical lives at https://www.braze.com/resources/articles/email-must-knows-whats-an-email-honey-pot*