As a Mailchimp Expert, I help alot of people and companies to clean and verify their newsletter email subscriber lists. Cleaning and verifying subscribers prior to attempting to send a campaign is very important as Mailchimp, Aweber, Constant Contact and all other good EDM (Electronic Direct Mail) services will suspend your account if too many of your email campaigns get marked as spam (or even if there are a large number of hard bounces). Mailchimp and others proactively perform various tests on your subscribers when you import those subscribers and will notify you if there are low quality email addresses on your list. Mailchimp call their tests and algorithm Omnivore.
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What causes an email address to be suspended by Mailchimp?
Identifying low quality email addresses (those that likely will cause bounces or causing spam notification) is difficult however there are various metrics that are used such as identifying role-based email addresses (e.g. admin@example.com and support@example.com) and free email addresses (e.g. example @hotmail.com and example@yahoo.com). Identifying these email addresses in a list is simple to do.
Mailchimp, Mad Mimi, Aweber and other email newsletter services all perform basic checks on lists to determine the proportion of role-based email addresses and free domains in a list. A high proportion of these type of email addresses will mean your newsletter service identifying your list as low quality.
How to remove free email addresses and role-based emails from a large list
Removing these low-quality addresses is however necessary and is simple enough to do in Microsoft Excel. Follow these instructions and learn how to remove free domain email addresses from your list (you can then perform similar actions to remove role-based subscribers).
- Open your subscriber list in Excel.
- In the Home ribbon click Sort & Filter then Filter.
- Click the down-arrow that has appeared at the top of the email column.
- Click Text Filters -> Ends With.
- Enter yahoo.com into the column to the right of ends with.
- Click OK.
- Delete all the results that appear.
- Repeat for all other free domain such as gmail.com, hotmail.com, yahoo.com.au, outlook.com, live.com, aol.com and so on.
Your list will not have all free domain email addresses removed. Easy!
I advise using Excel Add-in for Mailchimp – https://connect.mailchimp.com/integrations/excel-add-in-for-mailchimp
It connects Mailchimp data with Excel that can be especially useful when you have to do this task repeatedly