We all want to maximise the number of our emails that get read, as well as save money on mass emailing. Since mass emailing services often charge by the number of recipients on the mailing list, removing inactive accounts and avoiding the spam box helps businesses get the most bang for their buck.

What happens to email addresses on my list that aren’t valid?

When your mailing list contains email addresses that no longer exist and you try to send them your newsletter, the email bounces back. This shows up as a hard bounce in your campaign report.

Email sending platforms will automatically not send future emails to the email addresses that have bounced. If you’re sending mail to your list from the platform fairly regularly, you should be okay. But if you haven’t mailed the people on your list for a while (more than 3 months), or you’re mailing them for the first time, you’ll benefit from verifying their email addresses first.

What happens if I send mail to email addresses that don’t exist?

Understandably, you might think that a great way to clean out your invalid addresses is to send your newsletter and wait for the report. But each email sending platform has its own policies and levels of tolerance when it comes to invalid email addresses.

The impact of a high bounce rate

When emails can’t be delivered, a status of hard or soft bounce is given to the address. It’s important to guard against a high bounce rate. A hard bounce is marked as invalid immediately, while a soft bounce occurs when there could be a temporary issue with a mailbox (for example, the mailbox is full). Typically, a soft bounce will automatically convert to a hard bounce after a soft bounce has been returned in three consecutive campaigns.

Some platforms are very strict! If your campaign has a bounce rate of more than 2%, your account could be suspended. It’s hugely inconvenient if you can’t gain access or export your lists until you’ve cleared the issue with the platform’s support team. Sometimes it’s not possible to fix the problem at all, and you’re forced to start from scratch on an alternative platform.

The impact of hitting a spam trap

Another problem with sending emails to old addresses is that some of these could be used to create recycled spam traps. Anti-spam organisations, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and corporations use old email addresses and reassign them to spam trapping in order to identify spammers sending email to their domains. If you send to a spam trap, your sending domain and IP addresses will be blacklisted, and it will impact your sender reputation. This will result in your emails being blocked from delivery. If you’re blacklisted by some of the major anti-spam organisations, it can take a long time to get delisted and your email marketing will basically come to a complete standstill.