How to Clean a GetResponse List Before Bounces Pile Up

To clean a GetResponse list, export the contacts you plan to email, verify the CSV, and send only to the addresses marked valid. Keep risky addresses in a separate segment and leave invalid ones out. GetResponse removes hard-bounced addresses on its own, but only after a send has failed. A verifier catches those addresses first. SimpleVerifier Pro costs $39 a month: the first 100,000 checks a month at full speed, then slower, never cut off, with 100 free checks to try on your own export.

GetResponse rules in this post come from GetResponse's own help pages, read on 10 November 2026. They can change, so check your account for anything that matters.

How GetResponse handles bounces

GetResponse's help page on bounces draws the usual line:

• Hard bounces are permanent. The address is removed from your list automatically.
• Soft bounces are temporary, often a full mailbox or an unavailable server. The help page says automatic removal applies to the categories "Full mailbox", "Soft bounce - other reasons" and "Hard bounce - other reasons".
• Soft-bounce removal rule: a contact is removed once qualifying failures happen on four different days within a 32-day span, with at least 24 hours between counted failures.
• "Hard bounce - other reasons" addresses are removed after four unsuccessful delivery attempts within a 32-day period.

Removed contacts appear under Inactive contacts: go to Contacts, then Search, then Inactive, and open the Bounced tab. GetResponse also has a help article explaining why you should not re-add bounced addresses to your list.

What that does and does not protect

The rules protect you from repeating the same bad send forever. They do not protect you from the first one. A contact who soft bounces needs failures across several days before removal, so a dead mailbox can cost you several sends. A hard bounce costs one send each. If you import five thousand old contacts in one go, you find out which are dead by bouncing against them.

Mailbox providers and GetResponse's own monitoring see those bounces. See what to do after a high bounce rate for how bad a spike can get, and how to improve sender reputation for why a clean list matters before the send, not after.

Step by step: clean a GetResponse list

1. Export what you have already lost

Open Contacts, then Search, then Inactive, and look at the Bounced tab. Export it. This is your record of addresses never to mail again. If many of them share a domain, the bounce domain hotspot finder shows which ones.

2. Export the contacts you actually mail

Export the active contacts, or the segment you plan to send to. If you import often, export each source separately so you can tell which source produces the most bad addresses; the bounce rate by source tool is built for that comparison.

3. Tidy the file

Remove duplicates with the remove duplicate emails tool, and fix messy columns with the CSV column editor. Verifying the same address twice wastes checks, and a broken row can hide a good contact.

4. Verify the file

Upload it to the verify page or the CSV email verifier. Every address returns valid, risky or invalid with a reason. See email verification statuses explained if the terms are new.

5. Split by result

• Valid: your main sending segment.
• Risky and catch-all: a smaller segment. The server accepted the domain but cannot confirm the mailbox, so send less and watch results. See catch-all emails and what to do.
• Invalid: exclude. Add these to the same do-not-mail record as your bounced export.

6. Update GetResponse

Import the valid and risky files as separate segments or with a tag, so you can mail them differently. If you are bringing contacts from another platform, the GetResponse and AWeber import guide covers the file side. Never import the invalid file as active contacts.

7. Send small first, then check

Send the next campaign to the valid segment and compare the bounce count with your last send. If it is still high, read the bounce messages: some are mailbox problems, others are sender reputation problems that no list cleaning will fix. The bounce message analyzer helps tell them apart.

When to run this again

Before any big send, after any import and on a schedule. A list that grows steadily needs checking more often than a static one, because new signups include typos and throwaway addresses and old ones go stale. Use the list cleaning frequency calculator to pick an interval. For contacts that are valid but silent, a sunset policy is the right tool, not verification.

Stop bad addresses at the door

Cleaning a list is the second-best defence. The first is checking addresses as people sign up, so typos and fakes never enter. Our guide to verifying emails on a signup form shows the pattern, and stopping fake signups covers the abuse side.

Common mistakes

• Trusting automatic removal to be enough. It removes after bounces, which is what you were trying to avoid.
• Re-importing the bounced contacts because they were on an old spreadsheet. GetResponse's own help advises against re-adding them.
• Deleting all risky addresses. Segment them instead and keep the reach.
• Cleaning only before a launch. Decay happens all year.

A worked example

Suppose you run webinars and have a GetResponse list built from registration forms over two years. You check the Bounced tab under Inactive contacts and find a modest number of removed addresses, which feels fine. But you also remember that GetResponse needs failures across several different days before it removes a soft-bounce contact, so a mailbox that has quietly died may still be sitting in your active list, costing you a failed delivery on every send.

You export the active contacts and verify them. The file comes back with a group of invalid addresses that GetResponse had not caught yet, including typo domains from registration forms, and a group of risky addresses on company domains. You mail the valid group first and compare the bounce count with your last campaign. It drops. You then send to the risky group in a smaller batch and watch it. The invalid group goes into your do-not-mail record.

The lesson is that automatic removal measures what has already failed. Verification measures what is likely to fail, and the second is the one that protects your next send.

Questions to ask before each import

• Which source did these contacts come from, and how old are they?
• Have I checked them against my bounced export?
• Did people sign up themselves, or was this typed in by someone else?
• Is there a copy of the invalid file I can check future imports against?

What it costs

SimpleVerifier Pro is $39 a month. The first 100,000 checks a month run at full speed, then they run slower, and you are never cut off. A single export plus later imports fits well inside that for most lists. You can try 100 free checks on your own GetResponse export, no card, and see what share would have bounced. See the pricing page.

Bottom line

GetResponse removes hard bounces and repeated soft bounces after they happen. Verify the export first and you avoid most of those bounces. Export, verify, split by result, and re-import only what you intend to send to.