How often should a small business clean its email list?

There isn't one right number for everyone. A shop that adds hundreds of subscribers a week needs a different schedule from a newsletter that grows by a few dozen a month.

What doesn't change: every list goes stale. People change jobs, close old inboxes and stop using addresses they signed up with. A list that was perfectly clean in spring will have dead addresses in it by autumn.

A simple schedule

How you collect addresses	How often to clean
A few sign-ups a month, regular sends	Every 6 months
Steady sign-ups from a website form or shop checkout	Every 3 months
Lots of new contacts (pop-ups, giveaways, events, imports)	Every month, or before every big send

If you're not sure which one you are, start with every 3 months. It's often enough to catch problems early without being a chore.

When to clean straight away

Some moments matter more than the calendar. Clean before you send if:

• You haven't emailed the list in 6 months or more. This is the most common way senders blow up an otherwise healthy domain.
• You're about to send something important. A big sale, a launch or a relaunch is the worst time to discover a bounce problem.
• You've imported contacts from somewhere else. A spreadsheet, an event, a CRM or an old platform. You don't know how those addresses were collected or how old they are.
• You ran a giveaway or discount pop-up. These attract throwaway addresses and fake ones typed to get the code.
• Your email platform warned you about bounces. See what to do when your platform flags your account.
• Your bounce rate crept up. If it's heading towards 2%, don't wait for the next scheduled clean.

Signs your list is overdue

You don't always need a schedule to know. These are the usual warnings:

• More bounces in your campaign reports than usual
• Opens dropping even though your content hasn't changed
• Lots of sign-ups with typos like gmial.com or hotmal.com
• Addresses that look made up, like test@ or asdf@

Make it easier

Clean the whole list, not just the segment you're about to email. Old segments are where the dead addresses hide, and they'll get emailed eventually.

Add a confirmation step to your sign-up form. With double opt-in, a fake address can't confirm, so it never becomes a subscriber. In MailPoet, Mailchimp and most other platforms, it's a setting.

Stop sending to people who never open. Most platforms can do this for you after a set number of months. It keeps the list healthy between cleans.

Let a reminder do the remembering. After you clean a list with ListBouncer, we email you when it's 90 days old so you don't have to keep track. You can turn the reminders off in your account.

How long it takes

For most small lists, cleaning takes a few minutes of your time: export a CSV, upload it, download the clean file and import it back. The checking itself runs in the background and we email you when it's done.

New accounts get 100 free credits, and you can check up to 10 addresses a day with our free email checker without an account. To see how accurate the results are, take a look at our accuracy test.