Email List Hygiene Best Practices

Your email list is either an asset or a liability — and hygiene decides which.

A clean list gets you into inboxes, makes your campaigns profitable, and keeps your sender reputation bulletproof.
A dirty list gets you flagged, filtered, and forgotten.

Verify Regularly, Not Just Once

If you verified your list last year and think you’re safe, you’re already behind. Email addresses decay fast — people change jobs, companies close domains, inboxes get abandoned.

Every time you send without checking, you’re rolling the dice on your deliverability. And ESPs don’t take kindly to that gamble. They’ll spot the bounce spikes and start throttling or blocking your campaigns.

Remove Inactive or Bounced Addresses

Dead weight kills deliverability. If an address hasn’t engaged in months, it’s either abandoned or cold.
And if it bounced once, it’ll bounce again — and ESPs will notice.

• Cut them loose.
• Keep your list lean and responsive.
• Think of it like pruning: trim the dead branches so the healthy ones thrive.

Watch for Role-Based Emails (info@, sales@)

Role-based addresses like info@ or sales@ seem harmless — until you realise they’re usually shared inboxes with inconsistent monitoring.

They rarely lead to high engagement, and they’re more likely to trigger spam filters.

If you’re chasing actual conversions, not just bigger send numbers, these addresses belong in the bin.

Stop Using ‘Catch-All’ Addresses

Here’s the blunt truth: ‘Catch-all’ means “don’t know.”
Most verification tools shrug and hand you a maybe.
That’s how you end up sending to ghosts — and racking up bounces.

• Catch-all is a coin flip.
• Coin flips destroy sender reputations.
• Stop pretending “maybe” is good enough.

Use a Yes/No Verification Tool

Operators don’t need “possible” or “unknown.”
They need yes or no — send it or don’t.

Operators don’t work in “maybe.” They work in certainty. 

That’s why TLDR Verify exists. 

We strip out the hedging, the guesswork, the “could be valid” nonsense — and tell you exactly what’s safe to send.

The Payoff of List Hygiene

Do this right and you’ll:

• Reduce bounce rates to near-zero.
• Protect your domain and IP reputation.
• Land in more inboxes — and stay there.
• Stop wasting time and budget on junk data.

Ready to Clean Your List?