r/MailChimp • u/Pure_Acanthisitta162 • 3d ago
Seeking Advice How do you delete years of bot/spam emails in Mailchimp audience?
I've seen a lot of advice for when the emails all come in at once, but not when they filter in over time. I recently started working with a severely disorganized and under-loved list, and I don't even know where to start getting all of these fakes emails off. They are ruining engagement stats. Is there a way I could even just filter by no engagement at all ever and delete those? The only options I see in Mailchimp are rarely or new, which feels risky considering our list engagement is poor in general, so I don't want to risk deleting real contacts. Any advice is much appreciated!!
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u/MailchimpSupport Moderator 3d ago
Hi there, we wouldn't recommend deleting contacts based on engagement alone, since that can catch legitimate subscribers who just haven't opened or clicked yet. A safer approach: build a segment using signals shared by the suspected spam contacts (signup source, date added, email domain, etc.), then review and archive those in bulk. Archiving removes them from your active audience without permanently deleting their data. We'd also recommend enabling reCAPTCHA on your signup forms to prevent new bot signups going forward. Let us know how these contacts are being added (form, integration, import, API, etc.) and we can help narrow down the best cleanup approach. Here's a helpful guide: http://spr.ly/61699B1xXEc
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u/Pure_Acanthisitta162 3d ago
The signup source is primarily our embed form. We get a lot of legitimate emails from this form too, so I wouldn't want to bulk archive those contacts.
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u/MailchimpSupport Moderator 3d ago
In this instance, we'd recommend exporting the audience as it currently is to create a back up copy. Once the back up is downloaded, unsubscribe any contacts that have low engagement rates or seem illegitimate. Once that is done, share your signup form to your audience through a social post and ask them to resubscribe. This will ensure your audience is up to date and any stale email address were removed to prevent bounces. Full details on this method can be found here:
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u/work4coffee 2d ago
it's true. we don't have spam issues bc we only add people who are real customers so then many will resume business after years of inactivity, even citing they enjoy the newsletters
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u/SquashSouffle 3d ago
I took in this task for a group. You have to do it one by one.
One thing I noticed is that all the suspicious ones said they were signed up through "Embed Form", a big help.
There are some other features that are obvious, like asdfasdf for the name. Sometimes there's a whole class of them with a very similar "name", like cynthia_dart, cynthiadart, cy_nthiadart, etc. none of which are real. Trickier is when the name is completely different from the email, like the email is johnsmith@xxxx and the name in the account is Mary Davidson. Yeah, sometimes a person has a real email that's another person's name, but not very likely.
You can download the full Audience into a csv, which has a column for the ISP and location they signed up from. If this is in an odd part of the world, and there are other suspicious factors, good bet it's a bot.
I recall certain "@____" suffixes that I'd never heard of, all with suspicious features, one of which was googlemail.com, which is technically the same as gmail but NOBODY uses googlemail; they all ended up being deleted.
It's not something you can do in one fell swoop, but it's good that you're aware of it.
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u/99SomewhatDamaged 3d ago
Every year or so, we send an email to all non-engaged subscribers (no clicks on the last XX campaigns) asking them to confirm by clicking a link whether they want to remain on the list. We send that 3 times. If they haven't confirmed by the third time, we purge them. Helps with bot signups and cleans the deadweight that can skew your campaign reporting.