List hygiene

List hygiene covers everything you do to keep a contact list accurate and safe to send to: verifying addresses before use, removing hard bounces immediately, retiring addresses that keep soft bouncing, honouring unsubscribes and do-not-contact requests through a suppression list, removing duplicates, and deciding what to do with role-based, disposable and catch-all addresses.

Hygiene is ongoing because data decays: people change jobs, companies rebrand or change domains, and abandoned mailboxes get deleted. An address that was valid last quarter may bounce today, and some abandoned addresses are later turned into spam traps.

Mailbox providers judge senders partly on how clean their lists are. Google's sender guidelines tell senders to automatically unsubscribe recipients with multiple bounced messages and not to buy email addresses. Regular hygiene keeps bounce rate and complaints low, protects sender reputation, and stops your team wasting sequence steps on people who'll never see them.

Skrap.ai covers the verification part of list hygiene. Upload a CSV and see the estimated credit cost before processing; results are downloadable for 30 days. Invalid and Unknown results are free, so you only pay for addresses that come back Valid or Risky. Keep a team-wide do-not-contact list of emails and domains in Lists. For recurring checks, use the Google Sheets add-on or the API. See pricing.