About Cleaned Contacts

Cleaned contacts have email addresses that have hard bounced or repeatedly soft bounced, and are considered invalid.

In this article, you’ll learn about cleaned contacts and how to view or fix them.

Things to know

Here’s some things to know.

• Make sure you familiarize yourself with the different types of contacts in Mailchimp.
• Cleaned contacts don't count toward audience limits and cannot be archived.
• Cleaned contacts can be deleted but we recommend you keep them in your audience to avoid bounces.

Why addresses are cleaned

If you send an email to an invalid email address, it'll likely hard bounce. A hard bounce indicates a permanent reason an email can't be delivered, like a typo in an email address, server problems, or an outdated address. In most cases, Mailchimp will automatically remove addresses from your audience that hard bounce.

Cleaned addresses can't receive future emails you send to your audience. You can view cleaned addresses anytime or export them, but you can’t edit them.

There are occasionally cases in which valid email addresses will hard bounce.

View or export cleaned contacts

To view and export your cleaned contacts, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience, then click All contacts.
2. If you have more than 1 audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
3. Click the Create new segment drop-down, then click Regular segment.
4. Set the drop-down menus to Email subscription status | is one of | Cleaned.
5. Click Preview Segment.
6. To download a file of your cleaned contacts, click Export segment.
7. In the Export segment preview? pop-up modal, click Confirm export.
8. In the Export started pop-up, click View exports.
9. After the export completes, click Export As CSV to download the file to your computer.

Fix typos

If you try to send to a mistyped address, such as freddie@mailchii&mp.com, the email will probably hard bounce and be cleaned. Since cleaned contact information can't be edited, you'll need to add the new, corrected address to your audience. Mailchimp doesn’t charge for cleaned addresses, so you won’t be penalized for adding an extra contact.

To add a corrected address to your audience, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience, then click Audience dashboard.
2. If you have more than 1 audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
3. Click the Manage Audience drop-down and choose Add a subscriber.
4. Type in your contact’s corrected information and check the This person gave me permission to email them box.
5. Click Subscribe.

That’s it! The corrected email address is now subscribed to your marketing.