What "cleaned" means in Mailchimp, and whether you still pay for them
Mailchimp marks a contact as cleaned when its address bounces. What causes it, whether cleaned contacts count toward your bill, and what to do with them.
In Mailchimp, a cleaned contact is an address that bounced, so Mailchimp stopped sending to it. It isn't something you did: Mailchimp does it on its own to protect your sending reputation. Cleaned contacts don't count toward your plan.
Why a contact gets cleaned
Every campaign that can't be delivered comes back as a bounce, and Mailchimp sorts bounces into two kinds:
- Hard bounce: the address doesn't exist, the domain is gone or the server refuses it for good. Mailchimp cleans the contact right away.
- Soft bounce: a full mailbox, a server that's down, a message too large. Mailchimp keeps trying, and cleans the contact only after it keeps soft bouncing across several campaigns.
Do cleaned contacts count toward your bill?
No. Mailchimp bills for subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts, but not for cleaned ones. They stay in your audience as a record, so you don't need to delete or archive them to save money.
Where to find them
In your audience, open All contacts and filter by email marketing status Cleaned. You can export that list to look at it in a spreadsheet.
Can you re-add a cleaned contact?
Not by importing it again: Mailchimp won't resubscribe a cleaned address from a list. The person can come back by signing up again through one of your forms, which is the right way, because it proves the address works now. If a good address got cleaned because of a temporary problem on their side, ask them to sign up again.
What to look for in the cleaned list
- Typos: gmial.com, hotmial.com, a missing letter. If the person matters (a customer, a lead), get the right address and have them sign up.
- A spike after one campaign: many cleaned contacts at once usually means an old or imported list. Mailbox providers watch your bounce rate, and anything above about 2% starts to hurt where your emails land.
- Whole company domains: when a business closes or changes domain, all its addresses bounce together.
The real cost isn't the cleaned contacts
Cleaned contacts are free. The ones that cost you are the addresses that still work but never open, click or buy: they count toward your plan and teach mailbox providers that your mail isn't wanted. A free acadion audit shows how many of those you have and what archiving them would save.
Keep reading
Hard bounces: when should an address come off the suppression list?Not every hard bounce is a dead address. What the bounce codes mean, which ones to suppress for good, which ones deserve a quarantine, and how Mailchimp handles it.Ruth Williams · 
Sender reputation: the score your Mailchimp list is quietly earningEvery send to someone who never reacts counts against your domain. What sender reputation is, how inactive contacts drag it down, and how to protect it without deleting anyone.Ruth Williams ·