If you use Mailchimp and have spotted a "Cleaned" badge next to a contact's name, you are not losing subscribers in the usual sense. You are looking at Mailchimp's automated bounce management system at work, and understanding it is one of the fastest ways to protect your sender reputation, improve deliverability, and get accurate campaign metrics.
This guide covers exactly what Mailchimp email marketing cleaned contacts are, why they appear, how they affect your account, and the practical steps to prevent and manage them.
Key Takeaways
Cleaned contacts have email addresses that have hard bounced or repeatedly soft bounced, and are considered invalid.
Many marketers think "cleaned" equals "clean" or "ready to use," when in reality it means the exact opposite: the contact is invalid and undeliverable.
A cleaned contact has a non-deliverable email address, which might be misspelled or invalid, and will have a Cleaned badge in the Email Marketing column of the contact table.
You want to keep your bounce rate below 2%, or you will start to experience deliverability issues and harm your email sender reputation.
Email list decay reached 23% in 2025, down from 28% in 2024, meaning proactive list hygiene is not optional for any serious sender.
What "Cleaned" Actually Means in Mailchimp
The term trips up a lot of marketers. Mailchimp's use of the term "cleaned" is confusing because many people refer to email validation as email list cleaning. A "cleaned" email could also mean one that's been verified. But in Mailchimp, "cleaned" means that your campaign will not reach those people, effectively removing them from your list.
When Mailchimp marks an email address as "cleaned," it means the system has identified that email as undeliverable. This is not a guess; it happens only after Mailchimp attempts delivery and the receiving server rejects the message.
Mailchimp categorizes contacts based on their marketing status. A contact can have one of the following statuses on the contact table: subscribed, unsubscribed, non-subscribed, cleaned, or pending.
The cleaned status is fundamentally different from unsubscribed. Unsubscribed status means that the recipient has chosen to opt out of receiving emails from you, while cleaned status is the result of a bounced email or spam complaint. As a rule of thumb, "cleaned" means that Mailchimp has decided to remove a recipient for a variety of reasons, while "unsubscribed" means that the recipient removed themselves.
If you use Mailchimp and have spotted a "Cleaned" badge next to a contact's name, you are not losing subscribers in the usual sense. You are looking at Mailchimp's automated bounce management system at work, and understanding it is one of the fastest ways to protect your sender reputation, improve deliverability, and get accurate campaign metrics.
This guide covers exactly what Mailchimp email marketing cleaned contacts are, why they appear, how they affect your account, and the practical steps to prevent and manage them.
Key Takeaways
Cleaned contacts have email addresses that have hard bounced or repeatedly soft bounced, and are considered invalid.
Many marketers think "cleaned" equals "clean" or "ready to use," when in reality it means the exact opposite: the contact is invalid and undeliverable.
A cleaned contact has a non-deliverable email address, which might be misspelled or invalid, and will have a Cleaned badge in the Email Marketing column of the contact table.
You want to keep your bounce rate below 2%, or you will start to experience deliverability issues and harm your email sender reputation.
Email list decay reached 23% in 2025, down from 28% in 2024, meaning proactive list hygiene is not optional for any serious sender.
What "Cleaned" Actually Means in Mailchimp
The term trips up a lot of marketers. Mailchimp's use of the term "cleaned" is confusing because many people refer to email validation as email list cleaning. A "cleaned" email could also mean one that's been verified. But in Mailchimp, "cleaned" means that your campaign will not reach those people, effectively removing them from your list.
When Mailchimp marks an email address as "cleaned," it means the system has identified that email as undeliverable. This is not a guess; it happens only after Mailchimp attempts delivery and the receiving server rejects the message.
Mailchimp categorizes contacts based on their marketing status. A contact can have one of the following statuses on the contact table: subscribed, unsubscribed, non-subscribed, cleaned, or pending.
The cleaned status is fundamentally different from unsubscribed. Unsubscribed status means that the recipient has chosen to opt out of receiving emails from you, while cleaned status is the result of a bounced email or spam complaint. As a rule of thumb, "cleaned" means that Mailchimp has decided to remove a recipient for a variety of reasons, while "unsubscribed" means that the recipient removed themselves.
Why Mailchimp Cleans Contacts: The Two Types of Bounce
A cleaned contact in Mailchimp is an email address that can no longer receive emails. This happens because previous attempts to send an email to the address failed, resulting in what's known as an email bounce. There are two types of email bounces: soft and hard.
Hard Bounces
A hard bounce happens when an email could not be delivered to the intended address for permanent reasons. Those reasons include things like an incorrect or fake email address, an unregistered email domain, or a server refusing to accept the emails due to a security filter.
Even one hard bounce is enough for Mailchimp to classify the address as cleaned. This is deliberate. This status is Mailchimp's built-in safety mechanism. If Mailchimp allowed you to repeatedly send to invalid emails, you'd accumulate bounces, and those bounces would destroy your domain reputation.
Soft Bounces
A soft bounce is an email that isn't delivered for reasons that could be temporary. This could be something like an inbox being full, an email being too large, or temporary issues with deliverability.
Emails need to soft bounce at least 15 times for Mailchimp to clean a contact. Once that threshold is crossed, Mailchimp treats the address the same as a hard bounce and permanently suppresses it.
Spam Complaints
Contacts can also end up with cleaned status if they file spam complaints against your emails. The complaint process works like this: a recipient clicks "Mark as Spam" on an email from your address, their email provider sends a spam report to Mailchimp, and too many complaints about an address trigger cleaning by Mailchimp.
When Cleaned Contacts Appear in Your Audience
Mailchimp may clean a contact at any point in their lifecycle in your audience. Here are a few of the most common times when you'll see a subscriber become cleaned: after you send a campaign, when Mailchimp records the contacts that bounce, and addresses that hard bounce or soft bounce repeatedly will be marked as cleaned.
When you import contacts, if you import a misspelled or invalid email address, Mailchimp may automatically mark them as cleaned. Some emails will even be blocked from importing at all.
During an automated series, sometimes contacts that initially appear valid will bounce back repeatedly, leading to them being marked as cleaned.
One important nuance: if you try to send to a mistyped address, the email will probably hard bounce and be cleaned. Because cleaned contact information can't be edited, you'll need to add the new, corrected address to your audience. And here's the good news: Mailchimp doesn't charge for cleaned addresses, so you won't be penalized for adding an extra contact.
How Cleaned Contacts Affect Your Email Marketing
Deliverability and Sender Reputation
If you have a high number of cleaned email addresses in your list, it can negatively impact your sender reputation. A poor sender reputation can lead to emails being marked as spam or blocked by email service providers, resulting in reduced deliverability for your email campaigns.
Mailchimp maintains strict deliverability standards to protect the sender reputation of all its users. If a handful of Mailchimp users send to many invalid addresses, this can impact the delivery of all emails on Mailchimp's platform. To keep everyone out of spam, Mailchimp constantly cleans contacts and monitors compliance with laws like CAN-SPAM and GDPR.
Metrics Distortion
A high volume of cleaned contacts distorts every metric you rely on to make decisions. If 10 to 20% of your list is invalid, your click rates and engagement metrics become artificially low. Once cleaned contacts are removed, your metrics reflect real subscriber actions.
This matters when tracking your email marketing analytics, since artificially deflated open and click rates can lead you to change campaigns that are actually performing well.
The Billing Problem
Mailchimp bases its pricing on how many contacts you have, and that's all contacts, even those you can't send to. The same email address even counts as more than one contact for pricing purposes if it's in more than one list. So with a cleaned contact, you might be paying more than once for an address you can't even send to.
When a High Cleaned Rate Is a Signal to Investigate
More than 10 to 15% cleaned contacts is a red flag. Deliverability and engagement will likely suffer. It's time for an intensive list cleanse.
How to View, Export, and Manage Cleaned Contacts
Finding Your Cleaned Contacts
Follow these steps inside Mailchimp:
Click Audience, then click Segments.
Set the drop-down menus to Email subscription status | is one of | Cleaned, then click Use segment.
Name your segment, click Save and exit, then click the segment name to see the contacts in it.
To download a file of your cleaned contacts, click Export segment.
Archiving vs. Deleting Cleaned Contacts
Archived contacts won't receive your marketing, but you'll keep their historical data. You can unarchive them at any time.
In most cases, if you have outdated or inactive subscribers that don't interact with your marketing, you should choose to archive them. Delete contacts for GDPR purposes only.
If you do want to delete permanently, navigate to Audience > All Contacts > Manage Contacts > Data Management Tool. Click New Segment and change the conditions box to Cleaned, then hit Preview Segment. You can now choose which cleaned contacts you want to delete, or leave them all checked to delete all of them. Choose the Permanently Delete option.
Correcting Typo Addresses
If a contact was cleaned because of a typo, the address can't be edited. Click Add contacts, choose Add a single contact, enter your contact's corrected information, check the box next to "This person gave me permission to email them," and click Add contact.
How to Prevent Contacts from Getting Cleaned
The most effective approach is to stop invalid addresses from entering your list in the first place. Email list decay is a real and ongoing problem: email list decay reached 23% in 2025, down from 28% in 2024. That means roughly one in four addresses on any list will stop working within a year without active management.
1. Enable Double Opt-In
Single opt-in adds subscribers to your audience immediately after they submit a form, while double opt-in requires them to click a verification link in a confirmation email. Use single opt-in for fast audience growth or double opt-in to reduce spam and ensure valid contact information.
Double opted-in lists have much higher engagement levels over time, which translates to more opens, clicks, and fewer bounces and unsubscribes. When you use a double opt-in process, people won't be able to sign up with fake, non-existent, or stale email addresses.
2. Validate Your List Before Importing
Never import a list without verifying it first. The best way to keep your email list clean is to use an email verification tool. That's a good rule to follow in all situations. Tools like ZeroBounce and NeverBounce can flag invalid, risky, and spam-trap addresses before you even upload them to Mailchimp.
3. Never Use Purchased Lists
Purchased databases almost always contain bad data, like spam traps. Bought lists are unlikely to have any marketing value and may run afoul of various data collection laws and regulations. Bringing those contacts into your systems may jeopardize deliverability with existing subscribers.
4. Authenticate Your Domain
Authenticate your domain using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. These steps show email providers that Mailchimp is sending on your behalf. It can boost deliverability and reduce the chance of your emails bouncing.
5. Run Re-Engagement Campaigns for Inactive Contacts
Clean your list every 3 to 6 months. Remove contacts who haven't opened your emails in a long time. Send a re-engagement campaign if someone hasn't clicked or opened anything in 6 months or more. If they still don't respond, remove or archive them.
Combining this with email list segmentation strategies lets you identify at-risk contacts before Mailchimp flags them, protecting your sender score proactively rather than reactively.
6. Segment by Engagement
A list of 8,000 confirmed subscribers who open your emails beats a list of 10,000 unverified addresses where 15% bounce and another 30% never engage. ISPs reward engagement, not list size.
Build your email marketing strategy around list quality from the start. Smaller, engaged audiences consistently outperform larger, unverified ones.
Cleaned vs. Unsubscribed: A Clear Comparison
Status
Cause
Can Receive Marketing?
Counts Toward Billing?
Subscribed
Active opt-in
Yes
Yes
Unsubscribed
Contact opted out
No
Yes
Cleaned
Hard/repeated soft bounce
No
No
Pending
Double opt-in not confirmed
No
No
Archived
Manually archived
No
No
Unsubscribing is a choice made by your contact. Archiving is a choice made by you. And cleaning is an automatic action taken by Mailchimp after a delivery fails spectacularly.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I re-subscribe a cleaned contact in Mailchimp?
While you can't just click a button to "un-clean" these contacts, there's a safe, methodical way to identify and recover addresses that were flagged because of simple, fixable mistakes. If the original address was a typo or the subscriber has a new email, you can add the corrected or new address manually, with their permission. You cannot edit the cleaned address itself.
Do cleaned contacts count toward my Mailchimp plan limit?
A cleaned contact has a non-deliverable email address. They'll have a Cleaned badge in the Email Marketing column of the contact table, and they do not count toward the monthly contact limit. They can receive nothing.
What percentage of cleaned contacts is acceptable?
More than 10 to 15% cleaned contacts is a red flag and suggests deliverability and engagement are likely suffering. Of course, these thresholds aren't absolute. The ideal number can vary based on your industry, list size, email frequency, and other factors. A healthy list typically keeps bounce rates under 2%, so if your cleaned rate is climbing, address the root cause immediately.
Is Mailchimp cleaning my contacts a bad thing?
Not inherently. It might feel like a loss when Mailchimp marks contacts as cleaned, but it's actually a protective measure. Sending to invalid contacts increases bounce rate, which can be dangerous. By removing invalid emails from sending, Mailchimp prevents your audience count from dropping suddenly. The issue arises when cleaned rates are high, which points to deeper data hygiene problems that need your attention.
How often should I clean my Mailchimp list proactively?
Clean your list every 3 to 6 months and remove contacts who haven't opened your emails in a long time. For high-frequency senders or larger lists, quarterly validation with an email verification tool is a better cadence. Given that email list decay reached 23% in 2025, waiting longer than six months between hygiene reviews leaves a significant portion of your list degraded and at risk.
Why Mailchimp Cleans Contacts: The Two Types of Bounce
A cleaned contact in Mailchimp is an email address that can no longer receive emails. This happens because previous attempts to send an email to the address failed, resulting in what's known as an email bounce. There are two types of email bounces: soft and hard.
Hard Bounces
A hard bounce happens when an email could not be delivered to the intended address for permanent reasons. Those reasons include things like an incorrect or fake email address, an unregistered email domain, or a server refusing to accept the emails due to a security filter.
Even one hard bounce is enough for Mailchimp to classify the address as cleaned. This is deliberate. This status is Mailchimp's built-in safety mechanism. If Mailchimp allowed you to repeatedly send to invalid emails, you'd accumulate bounces, and those bounces would destroy your domain reputation.
Soft Bounces
A soft bounce is an email that isn't delivered for reasons that could be temporary. This could be something like an inbox being full, an email being too large, or temporary issues with deliverability.
Emails need to soft bounce at least 15 times for Mailchimp to clean a contact. Once that threshold is crossed, Mailchimp treats the address the same as a hard bounce and permanently suppresses it.
Spam Complaints
Contacts can also end up with cleaned status if they file spam complaints against your emails. The complaint process works like this: a recipient clicks "Mark as Spam" on an email from your address, their email provider sends a spam report to Mailchimp, and too many complaints about an address trigger cleaning by Mailchimp.
When Cleaned Contacts Appear in Your Audience
Mailchimp may clean a contact at any point in their lifecycle in your audience. Here are a few of the most common times when you'll see a subscriber become cleaned: after you send a campaign, when Mailchimp records the contacts that bounce, and addresses that hard bounce or soft bounce repeatedly will be marked as cleaned.
When you import contacts, if you import a misspelled or invalid email address, Mailchimp may automatically mark them as cleaned. Some emails will even be blocked from importing at all.
During an automated series, sometimes contacts that initially appear valid will bounce back repeatedly, leading to them being marked as cleaned.
One important nuance: if you try to send to a mistyped address, the email will probably hard bounce and be cleaned. Because cleaned contact information can't be edited, you'll need to add the new, corrected address to your audience. And here's the good news: Mailchimp doesn't charge for cleaned addresses, so you won't be penalized for adding an extra contact.
How Cleaned Contacts Affect Your Email Marketing
Deliverability and Sender Reputation
If you have a high number of cleaned email addresses in your list, it can negatively impact your sender reputation. A poor sender reputation can lead to emails being marked as spam or blocked by email service providers, resulting in reduced deliverability for your email campaigns.
Mailchimp maintains strict deliverability standards to protect the sender reputation of all its users. If a handful of Mailchimp users send to many invalid addresses, this can impact the delivery of all emails on Mailchimp's platform. To keep everyone out of spam, Mailchimp constantly cleans contacts and monitors compliance with laws like CAN-SPAM and GDPR.
Metrics Distortion
A high volume of cleaned contacts distorts every metric you rely on to make decisions. If 10 to 20% of your list is invalid, your click rates and engagement metrics become artificially low. Once cleaned contacts are removed, your metrics reflect real subscriber actions.
This matters when tracking your email marketing analytics, since artificially deflated open and click rates can lead you to change campaigns that are actually performing well.
The Billing Problem
Mailchimp bases its pricing on how many contacts you have, and that's all contacts, even those you can't send to. The same email address even counts as more than one contact for pricing purposes if it's in more than one list. So with a cleaned contact, you might be paying more than once for an address you can't even send to.
When a High Cleaned Rate Is a Signal to Investigate
More than 10 to 15% cleaned contacts is a red flag. Deliverability and engagement will likely suffer. It's time for an intensive list cleanse.
How to View, Export, and Manage Cleaned Contacts
Finding Your Cleaned Contacts
Follow these steps inside Mailchimp:
Click Audience, then click Segments.
Set the drop-down menus to Email subscription status | is one of | Cleaned, then click Use segment.
Name your segment, click Save and exit, then click the segment name to see the contacts in it.
To download a file of your cleaned contacts, click Export segment.
Archiving vs. Deleting Cleaned Contacts
Archived contacts won't receive your marketing, but you'll keep their historical data. You can unarchive them at any time.
In most cases, if you have outdated or inactive subscribers that don't interact with your marketing, you should choose to archive them. Delete contacts for GDPR purposes only.
If you do want to delete permanently, navigate to Audience > All Contacts > Manage Contacts > Data Management Tool. Click New Segment and change the conditions box to Cleaned, then hit Preview Segment. You can now choose which cleaned contacts you want to delete, or leave them all checked to delete all of them. Choose the Permanently Delete option.
Correcting Typo Addresses
If a contact was cleaned because of a typo, the address can't be edited. Click Add contacts, choose Add a single contact, enter your contact's corrected information, check the box next to "This person gave me permission to email them," and click Add contact.
How to Prevent Contacts from Getting Cleaned
The most effective approach is to stop invalid addresses from entering your list in the first place. Email list decay is a real and ongoing problem: email list decay reached 23% in 2025, down from 28% in 2024. That means roughly one in four addresses on any list will stop working within a year without active management.
1. Enable Double Opt-In
Single opt-in adds subscribers to your audience immediately after they submit a form, while double opt-in requires them to click a verification link in a confirmation email. Use single opt-in for fast audience growth or double opt-in to reduce spam and ensure valid contact information.
Double opted-in lists have much higher engagement levels over time, which translates to more opens, clicks, and fewer bounces and unsubscribes. When you use a double opt-in process, people won't be able to sign up with fake, non-existent, or stale email addresses.
2. Validate Your List Before Importing
Never import a list without verifying it first. The best way to keep your email list clean is to use an email verification tool. That's a good rule to follow in all situations. Tools like ZeroBounce and NeverBounce can flag invalid, risky, and spam-trap addresses before you even upload them to Mailchimp.
3. Never Use Purchased Lists
Purchased databases almost always contain bad data, like spam traps. Bought lists are unlikely to have any marketing value and may run afoul of various data collection laws and regulations. Bringing those contacts into your systems may jeopardize deliverability with existing subscribers.
4. Authenticate Your Domain
Authenticate your domain using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. These steps show email providers that Mailchimp is sending on your behalf. It can boost deliverability and reduce the chance of your emails bouncing.
5. Run Re-Engagement Campaigns for Inactive Contacts
Clean your list every 3 to 6 months. Remove contacts who haven't opened your emails in a long time. Send a re-engagement campaign if someone hasn't clicked or opened anything in 6 months or more. If they still don't respond, remove or archive them.
Combining this with email list segmentation strategies lets you identify at-risk contacts before Mailchimp flags them, protecting your sender score proactively rather than reactively.
6. Segment by Engagement
A list of 8,000 confirmed subscribers who open your emails beats a list of 10,000 unverified addresses where 15% bounce and another 30% never engage. ISPs reward engagement, not list size.
Build your email marketing strategy around list quality from the start. Smaller, engaged audiences consistently outperform larger, unverified ones.
Cleaned vs. Unsubscribed: A Clear Comparison
Status
Cause
Can Receive Marketing?
Counts Toward Billing?
Subscribed
Active opt-in
Yes
Yes
Unsubscribed
Contact opted out
No
Yes
Cleaned
Hard/repeated soft bounce
No
No
Pending
Double opt-in not confirmed
No
No
Archived
Manually archived
No
No
Unsubscribing is a choice made by your contact. Archiving is a choice made by you. And cleaning is an automatic action taken by Mailchimp after a delivery fails spectacularly.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I re-subscribe a cleaned contact in Mailchimp?
While you can't just click a button to "un-clean" these contacts, there's a safe, methodical way to identify and recover addresses that were flagged because of simple, fixable mistakes. If the original address was a typo or the subscriber has a new email, you can add the corrected or new address manually, with their permission. You cannot edit the cleaned address itself.
Do cleaned contacts count toward my Mailchimp plan limit?
A cleaned contact has a non-deliverable email address. They'll have a Cleaned badge in the Email Marketing column of the contact table, and they do not count toward the monthly contact limit. They can receive nothing.
What percentage of cleaned contacts is acceptable?
More than 10 to 15% cleaned contacts is a red flag and suggests deliverability and engagement are likely suffering. Of course, these thresholds aren't absolute. The ideal number can vary based on your industry, list size, email frequency, and other factors. A healthy list typically keeps bounce rates under 2%, so if your cleaned rate is climbing, address the root cause immediately.
Is Mailchimp cleaning my contacts a bad thing?
Not inherently. It might feel like a loss when Mailchimp marks contacts as cleaned, but it's actually a protective measure. Sending to invalid contacts increases bounce rate, which can be dangerous. By removing invalid emails from sending, Mailchimp prevents your audience count from dropping suddenly. The issue arises when cleaned rates are high, which points to deeper data hygiene problems that need your attention.
How often should I clean my Mailchimp list proactively?
Clean your list every 3 to 6 months and remove contacts who haven't opened your emails in a long time. For high-frequency senders or larger lists, quarterly validation with an email verification tool is a better cadence. Given that email list decay reached 23% in 2025, waiting longer than six months between hygiene reviews leaves a significant portion of your list degraded and at risk.
