List hygiene for cold outbound that stays deliverable
Keep bounce rates and spam complaints low with list hygiene practices that protect your SMTP reputation.
List hygiene means continuously removing bad, risky, or non-consenting addresses so your outbound stays deliverable. Hygiene is not a one-time CSV clean — it is an operating habit.
What to remove or quarantine
- Hard bounces and known invalid addresses
- Role accounts (
info@,admin@) when your motion is person-to-person - Catch-all domains that never engage
- Contacts who unsubscribed or marked spam
- Purchased or scraped lists you cannot justify under anti-spam law
A weekly hygiene loop
- Export recent hard bounces and suppress them workspace-wide.
- Review complaint signals from your ESP or postmaster tools.
- Retire contacts who never engage after a full journey.
- Re-verify sources before large enrollments.
Hygiene inside workspaces
Separate workspaces keep a bad list in one motion from poisoning another brand’s domain. OutboundOS scopes contacts and retired contacts per workspace so suppression stays local.
Bottom line
Your SMTP credentials only help if the list deserves inbox placement. Clean lists + authenticated domains + respectful cadence beat clever copy every time.
Create a workspace and keep hygiene inside the same system that runs your journeys.