How do I improve email deliverability by verifying and cleaning my email list?

Hi! Yes—email list verification and regular list cleaning are solid best practices for protecting deliverability, especially after you’ve seen a bounce spike. Verification helps you catch invalid addresses (and some risky ones) before they create hard bounces, which in turn keeps mailbox providers more willing to place your campaigns in the inbox.

That said, you usually don’t need to re-verify your entire list before every single campaign. A better approach is “always-on hygiene” plus periodic deep cleaning:

• Always-on (every send):

  • Auto-suppress hard bounces immediately (never mail them again).
  • Keep unsubscribes and spam complaints suppressed permanently.
  • Watch bounce rate trends; a sudden jump is a “stop and investigate” moment.

• At signup (best ROI):

  • If you can, verify or validate emails in real time on your forms (or use double opt-in). This prevents bad addresses from ever entering your list and is usually more effective than bulk cleanups later.

• Bulk verification cadence (rule of thumb):

  • Monthly: if you add lots of new subscribers, run frequent promos, or collect emails from higher-risk sources (in-person events, manual entry, giveaways).
  • Quarterly: for many healthy, steady opt-in programs—verify newly added contacts and older “not recently mailed” segments.
  • Before a big/high-stakes send: if you’re emailing a large segment you haven’t mailed in a while (or reactivating older subscribers), it’s smart to verify/clean that specific segment first.

A good practical strategy is to verify new contacts regularly (weekly/monthly depending on volume) and re-verify only “stale” or higher-risk segments, rather than paying to re-check your most active engagers over and over.

One more important piece: verification helps bounces, but engagement drives inbox placement too. So pair verification with a simple engagement-based cleanup (“sunset policy”), like reducing frequency or pausing sends to people who haven’t opened/clicked in a long time, and running a re-permission campaign before you fully suppress them. That combo—low bounces + strong engagement—is what usually stabilizes deliverability long term.

If you tell me how often you send (daily/weekly/monthly), roughly how fast your list grows, and whether you ever email older inactive subscribers, I can suggest a cadence that’s tighter and more cost-effective for your specific setup.