Validate an email list
Reduce bounce and trap risk before a campaign by validating and suppressing bad addresses.
- Difficulty:
- Intermediate
- Prerequisites:
- Suppression lists current, Consent basis understood
- Last updated:
- 2026-07-15
- Author:
- empire
Objective
Improve list hygiene
Validate, clean, and segment lists before high-risk sends.
Starting state
List ready for a send; hygiene status unknown or stale
Prerequisites
- Suppression lists current
- Consent basis understood
Estimated time
1–2 hours
Difficulty
intermediate
Required access
- CRM/ESP
- Validation tooling
Inputs
- List export
- Validation results
- Prior bounce history
Step-by-step instructions
- ValidateRun syntax/domain/mailbox checks appropriate to your risk tolerance.
- SuppressRemove invalids, role risks you choose to exclude, and prior hard bounces.
- DocumentRecord what was removed and why before the campaign launches.
Verification
- Hard-bounce rate on a test send is within policy
Common mistakes
- Validating after the campaign already spiked bounces
- How aggressively to treat catch-all domains?
Rollback / recovery
- N/A — restorations should be rare; keep an audit of removals
Expected outcome
List risk is reduced before high-volume sending.
When to escalate
- Validation vendor results conflict with historical delivery