Key takeaways
- Remove what is known to be bad; hold what is merely uncertain.
- Duplicates and role addresses cause as many problems as invalid ones.
- A confidence score is not a mailbox check; use a verification service if you need one.
- Clean before every send, not once a year.
What should you remove from an email list
Remove every address you already know should not receive the campaign: past hard bounces, opt-outs, duplicates and addresses with obvious errors. These are certain problems, so deleting them from the send needs no judgement.
- Hard bounces from earlier sends.
- Unsubscribes, objections and anyone on your do not contact list.
- Duplicate contacts, merged so each person appears once.
- Shared role addresses such as info@ or sales@, for cold outreach.
- Addresses with typos, missing domains or placeholder text.
- People you know have left the company.
Which addresses should you hold back rather than delete
Hold back addresses that might be fine but have not been confirmed: those with a low confidence score, those flagged as catch-all and those nobody has emailed in a long time. Deleting them loses real contacts; sending to them in the main batch risks bounces.
Put them in a separate group. Send to it later in a small batch, or run it through a mailbox verification service first, and remove each address that fails.
How do you reduce bounce rate before sending
Reduce bounce rate before sending by starting with the addresses you trust most, sending in batches and removing every bounce before the next batch goes out. Each bounce you catch early protects the rest of the campaign.
Avoid adding bought or scraped lists to a campaign at the last minute. Their addresses have no history with you, and you cannot tell which are current.
Does Pebbles Ai verify email addresses
No, Pebbles Ai does not verify mailboxes. Leads found with Find fresh leads carry a work email where one is found, with a confidence score and a catch-all flag, which help you decide what to hold back but do not confirm that a mailbox exists.
It also does not manage deliverability, warm up mailboxes or rotate senders. If your campaign needs a mailbox check, use a verification service alongside it and bring the cleaned list back.
How often should you scrub an email list
Scrub an email list before every campaign, and on a regular schedule for lists that sit unused. Contact data decays as people change jobs, companies rebrand and mailboxes close.
A quick check before each send catches most of it. A deeper review each quarter, with duplicates merged and old contacts reconfirmed, keeps the list from drifting.
How to clean an email list before a campaign, step by step
Remove the certain problems first, then deal with the uncertain ones.
- Remove every hard bounce, unsubscribe and objection from earlier sends.
- Merge duplicate contacts so nobody receives the same email twice.
- Take shared role addresses out of cold campaigns.
- Move low-confidence and catch-all addresses into a held group.
- Check the held group with a mailbox verification service, or send to it later in a small batch.
- Send the main batch and remove any new bounce before the next send.
Where Pebbles Ai fits
- CapabilityProspecting & customer recordsEach lead's work email carries a confidence score and a catch-all flag, and the CRM, in Beta, merges 2 to 100 duplicate records at a time and restores deleted records from the Bin.
- CapabilityOutreach contentA template send to a CRM segment always asks for approval, which is your last chance to check the cleaned segment before anything goes out.
Common questions
What is the difference between cleaning and verifying a list?
Cleaning removes what you already know is wrong, such as bounces and duplicates. Verifying checks whether each remaining mailbox exists, usually with a dedicated service.
Should I email catch-all addresses at all?
Yes, carefully. Send to them after your confident addresses, in a small batch, and remove any that bounce.
Why take role addresses like info@ out of cold campaigns?
They reach a shared inbox where nobody owns the reply, and some companies treat cold mail to them as unwanted. Keep them for inbound or support contact.
About this page. Written by the Pebbles Ai team for people who run sales, marketing and growth. Last updated .
