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Deliverability

List hygiene

List hygiene is the habit of removing addresses that bounce, never engage, or should never have been added, so your sending reputation is not spent on people who are not there.

Contact data decays continuously. People leave, businesses close, domains lapse, and an address that worked in March can be dead by September. A list that is never cleaned gets worse every month whether or not you add to it.

The minimum discipline is three rules: remove hard bounces immediately and permanently, re-verify anything older than about three months before reusing it, and honour unsubscribes across every list you own rather than the one they came from.

Goes deeper: Why Your Cold Emails Land in Spam

Related terms

Hard bounce
A hard bounce is a permanent rejection — the mailbox does not exist, or the domain cannot receive mail. The address should be removed immediately and never retried.
Bounce rate
Bounce rate is the share of sent messages the receiving server refused. Under 2% is healthy for cold outreach; above 5% and mailbox providers start treating you as a sender who did not collect their own list.
Email verification
Email verification is checking whether an address can actually receive mail before you send to it. A full check tests the syntax, then the domain's mail records, then asks the receiving server about the specific mailbox.
Sender reputation
Sender reputation is the score mailbox providers keep on your domain and sending IP, based on how recipients react to your mail. It decides whether your next message reaches the inbox.