Do You Need a List Scrub?

The quality of the email addresses in your list plays an essential role in optimizing deliverability and response rates. The ISPs are looking at the percent of "unknown users" and "spam traps" hit as part of their reputation checks. These are key factors in the battle to reach the inbox. Sometimes, hitting only one spam trap is enough to cause your mail to be filtered, your IP to be blacklisted, or both.

On any given list you'll find a number of email addresses that are potentially spam traps, invalid, or discontinued. Many times, email addresses on mailing lists are misspelled or are one letter away from the true recipient's address. Using the available double opt-in tools within the BlueHornet eMS application will prevent invalid or misspelled address from going into your list and will ensure that your list is only comprised of subscribers who have confirmed that they want to receive your mail.

In many situations, however, lists are imported without using our double opt-in tools. This is where a List Scrub becomes very useful. This service is offered under BlueHornet's SureSend™ Deliverability Management Services platform. The scrub will parse your import list for "bad" email addresses. The list scrubbing tool marks an email address as bad if it meets any of the following criteria:

1. The mailbox name matches a general list of mailboxes that should not appear on a mailing list, such as "john.doe", "asdf" or mailboxes consisting of only numerals. These will also include spam trap addresses.
2. Domains that have been identified as spam trap domains, or domains that have specifically requested exclusion from our client's email distribution.
3. Domains which have no MX record, and therefore would ultimately fail if we attempted to send mail to any address at that domain.

Email addresses matching any of the above criteria will be rejected, and sent back to you for further consideration. As mentioned above, in some cases the cause for the rejection may be as simple as a typo. In other cases, it may become evident that a list has been "poisoned," with bad addresses or spam traps, and we'll help you take action to discover the source of the problem. In any case, this is done to better ensure that your subscriber base is as clean as possible, to better increase deliverability and open rates.

Please contact your account development manager directly or send an email to suresend@BlueHornet.com if you would like to request a list scrub.