I don’t know whether they used black hat methods to drive traffic or
any bad thing.
My suggestion there are bunch of ways to check this before buying the domain:
- Check the domain through Aherfs to see the backlinks it has and from the types then you can usually decide whether the site is ok or it’s spamed.
- If you’re unable to see classify backlinks then you can use tools such Congitive SEO and it will automatically detect spammy backlinks & good backlinks.
- Another good way to see whether any blackhat method is used is by the backlink’s anchor texts, frequency & trustability of source.
- You can also try with alternatives to webarchive to see if they have picked something which you don’t like. eg: ScreenShots & Archive.is
- Finally you can also try to see any old indexed pages on search engines and also try to see what search query “yourdomain.com” comes up.
If something happened like that in the past, will it affect me in 2018
also if I buy this domain name and start a website (SEO, email spam
perspective)?
If it’s has a bad history site-wise and backlink-wise then you need to decide whether you have the time & resources it takes to build the new trust, disallowing the bad links, recover from the bad reputation, earn the search engines trust again.
Or can I totally forget my fear since there was no website in the last
4 years?
You should never ignore but you need make a calculated decision since backlinks are can be alive even if domain was expired so you need to weigh in your options to make an informed decision.