The family of exponential maps fa(z) = e z + a is of fundamental importance in the study of transcendental dynamics. Here we consider the topological structure of certain subsets of the Julia set J(fa). When a ∈ (−∞, −1), and more generally when a belongs to the Fatou set F (fa), it is known that J(fa) can be written as a union of hairs and endpoints of these hairs. In 1990, Mayer proved for a ∈ (−∞, −1) that, while the set of endpoints is totally separated, its union with infinity is a connected set. Recently, Alhabib and the second author extended this result to the case where a ∈ F (fa), and showed that it holds even for the smaller set of all escaping endpoints.We show that, in contrast, the set of non-escaping endpoints together with infinity is totally separated. It turns out that this property is closely related to a topological structure known as a 'spider's web'; in particular we give a new topological characterisation of spiders' webs that may be of independent interest. We also show how our results can be applied to Fatou's function,Still assuming that a ∈ (−∞, −1), the complementary set of non-escaping endpoints of f a satisfies the following identities:see Corollary 2.2 and Proposition 2.4. Here J r (f a ) is the radial Julia set, a set of particular importance. The results of [2] naturally suggest the question whether ∞ is an explosion point for J r (f a ) also. It is known [36, Section 2] that J r (f a ) has Hausdorff dimension strictly greater than one, which is compatible with this possibility. Nonetheless, we prove here that the sets of escaping and non-escaping endpoints are topologically very different from each other.Theorem 1.2 (Non-escaping endpoints do not explode). Let a ∈ (−∞, −1). Then the set J r (f a ) ∪ {∞} is totally separated.