About Cleaned Contacts
Your Mailchimp list is designed to help you collect and manage all of your contacts in one place, whether they're subscribed, unsubscribed, non-subscribed, or cleaned. Cleaned contacts have 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.
Why Addresses are Cleaned
If you send an email campaign to an invalid email address, it will 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indicates a permanent reason an email can't be delivered, like a typo in an email address, server problems, or an outdated address. Mailchimp will automatically remove addresses from your list that hard bounce.
Cleaned addresses can't receive future email campaigns you send to your list. You can view cleaned addresses anytime or export a list of them, but you can’t edit them.
View or Export Cleaned Contacts (In your MailChimp account)
To view your cleaned contacts, you'll need to create a segment of them in your list.
Navigate to the Lists page and click the name of the list you want to work with.
Click New Segment.
Set the drop-down menus to Email Marketing Status | is | Cleaned.
Click Preview Segment.
In the pop-up modal, name your segment and click Save.
To download a file of your cleaned contacts, click Export Segment. After the export is complete, we’ll send a file of your cleaned contacts to the account owner.
Fix Typos
If you try to send to a mistyped address, such as freddie@mailchii&mp.com, the email will probably hard bounce. This means that the address will be excluded from future campaign sends and placed in the Cleaned portion of your list. Cleaned contact profiles can’t be changed or edited.
However, there’s a quick workaround to fix a mistyped email address that’s been cleaned. Simply add the new, corrected address to your list. Mailchimp doesn’t charge for cleaned addresses in your list, so you won’t be penalized for adding an extra contact.
To add a corrected address to your list, follow these steps.
Navigate to the Lists page.
Click the Add Subscriber icon next to the list you want to work with.
Type in your contact’s corrected information and check the This person gave me permission to be added to my list box.
Click Subscribe.
That’s it! The corrected email address is now a part of your email marketing subscriber list.
*Information in this article taken from the Mailchimp help desk. It can be found HERE.