Email List Hygiene Guide
Email list hygiene is the process of regularly cleaning your email list to remove invalid, risky, or unengaged addresses. Good list hygiene directly improves your inbox placement rate, reduces bounce rates, and protects your sender reputation.
Why list hygiene matters
- Hard bounces above 2% trigger ISP throttling and blacklisting
- Spam trap hits result in immediate IP and domain blacklisting
- Low engagement from unengaged contacts hurts your sender score
- Sending to role addresses (info@, admin@) wastes volume and risks complaints
Recommended hygiene frequency
- Before every major campaign: validate the entire send list
- Monthly: suppress hard bounces from the previous month's sends
- Quarterly: run re-engagement campaigns for contacts who have not opened in 6 months
- Annually: full list audit including domain health checks
Related pages