A healthy email list is one where most of the addresses you send to are real, in use, and belong to people who want to hear from you. It is one of the main things you control that affects whether your emails land in the inbox or get filtered to spam.

Mailbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook decide where your email goes based on how recipients react to it. When you send to addresses that bounce, to people who never opted in, or to contacts who report your mail as spam, those providers learn that your mail is unwanted. Over time that hurts deliverability for everyone on your list, including your most engaged supporters. The damage is gradual and it compounds. A list that was performing fine can slowly start landing in spam folders because of a steady trickle of bad sends.

The goal is to keep your sends concentrated on addresses that are valid and engaged, and to stop sending to addresses that have gone bad or opted out.

You do not have to manage a manual suppression list. Before every campaign goes out, Raise More checks each recipient and drops addresses that fall into any of these categories:

Once an address falls into one of these buckets, Raise More stops sending to it across your whole organization. You will not accidentally keep mailing someone who opted out or whose address is dead. This protects you from the most common and most damaging list-health mistakes without any work on your part.

Automatic suppression handles the known-bad and opted-out addresses. The rest of list health is about the addresses that are technically valid but still hurting you.

Only add addresses with real consent. Add people who gave you their email and expect to hear from you: donors, event attendees, people who signed up through a form. Consent is what keeps complaint rates low, and complaint rate is what providers watch most closely.

Prune or stop mailing chronically disengaged contacts. Someone who has not opened or clicked anything in many months is dragging down your engagement signals even if their address still works. Use the people filters to build a saved list of contacts who recently opened or clicked, and send to that. You do not have to delete anyone. You can simply stop including long-inactive contacts in your regular sends, or run an occasional re-engagement message to them separately.

Watch the numbers on every campaign. Each campaign in the email campaigns list shows its result columns once it has finished sending. Look at the bounce columns (Provider bounces, Hard bounces, Content blocks, Temp bounces, Unknown bounces), the Unsubscribed column, and the "Clicked report spam" column. Each count links to the report of which addresses are in it. A spike in any of these is a signal that something is wrong: maybe you imported a stale list, maybe you mailed people who did not expect it, maybe your subject line felt deceptive. Catch it early before it affects your sender reputation.

Segment to engaged people. Use filters and saved lists to send to the people most likely to open and act. "Email was opened" and "Link inside email was clicked" are filterable fields on people, alongside tags and date of donation, so you can build a list of recently engaged contacts and send to that. Smaller, more engaged sends almost always outperform large sends to everyone, both in results and in how providers treat your mail going forward.

Authenticate your sending domain. When you set up your sending identity in Raise More, complete the domain verification step (DKIM, SPF, DMARC). Authenticated mail is far more likely to reach the inbox and far less likely to be spoofed.

Do I need to keep my own do-not-mail list? No. Unsubscribes, bounces, repeated soft bounces, and spam complaints are suppressed automatically across your organization.

Will deleting a contact remove them from suppression? Suppression is tied to the address and the reason it was suppressed, not to whether the contact record exists. The safe assumption is that an opted-out or bad address stays suppressed.

A good supporter says they stopped getting my emails. What happened? Check whether their address was suppressed (an unsubscribe, a bounce, or a spam complaint). If it bounced once by mistake or they unsubscribed and now want back in, reach out to support so it can be reviewed.

How often should I clean my list? Make it routine. Review your campaign bounce, "Clicked report spam", and Unsubscribed numbers after each send, and revisit your engagement segments every month or two so you keep concentrating sends on people who are actually reading.