Use Clean Lists to review invalid addresses, delivery problems, existing exclusions, and recipients with no recent recorded opens. You choose the list, issue, and action before Cedros changes anything.
Cleanup can stop selected memberships from receiving campaigns, add a suppression that applies across lists, or collect recipients for review. It does not send an email, correct an address, or delete a contact's history.
Before you begin
Open Lists in your site's admin. You need permission to manage lists and view recipient details to use Clean Lists. Adding suppressions requires separate suppression-management permission. If a control is unavailable, see Why can't I see or use a feature?.
Decide which list and problem you want to address. Start with a specific list when you are unsure about the effect. All lists is selected by default, and a suppression can affect sending beyond the list you select.
The scan covers active lists and excludes cleanup review segments. Its counts represent list memberships, not necessarily unique people. One recipient can appear in several lists and match several issues, so adding the issue counts together can count the same person more than once.
If you are investigating an opt-out or blocked recipient, read Managing unsubscribed and suppressed recipients for the difference between membership status, consent, preferences, and suppression. A Subscribed label alone does not guarantee that someone can receive a campaign.
Scan your lists and choose an issue
- In Lists, select Clean Lists.
- Select Get started and wait for the scan to finish. Scanning does not change recipients.
- Under Which list should we clean?, select a named list with issues, or deliberately keep All lists. Select Continue.
- Under What would you like to clean up?, choose one issue with a nonzero count. Check the scan time as well as the count.
- For Recipients with no recent opens, review What counts as inactive? and choose an available window. Wait for the refreshed scan before continuing.
- Select Continue to load the affected memberships for review.
If no issues are found, Cedros shows Your lists are clean, the list and membership counts, and the scan time. Select Recheck for a fresh scan or Back to lists to leave. This result means none of these cleanup checks matched at that time; it is not a guarantee that every address is deliverable or that every recipient has marketing consent.
The issue choices mean:
- Invalid email addresses: an address is missing or fails the format check. Cleanup can exclude it; it cannot establish the correct replacement address or confirm that a mailbox exists.
- Bounced addresses: the membership is marked bounced, or recorded provider feedback includes a hard bounce, complaint, or rejection. Review the reason before treating every match as a permanently nonexistent mailbox. A single soft bounce does not qualify by itself; repeated soft bounces can lead to a bounced membership.
- Suppressed addresses: an active suppression matches the recipient or address. These records are already blocked from marketing sends; cleanup can also make their list memberships inactive or collect them for review.
- Recipients with no recent opens: qualifying subscribed memberships have no sufficiently recent recorded email open. Review this group carefully before changing it; an absent open record is not proof that someone is uninterested.
- Unsubscribed recipients: the membership or recipient is marked unsubscribed. Keep that exclusion. Cleanup does not collect fresh permission or resubscribe them.
You address one issue at a time. Complete and check that action before starting another.
Interpret the no-recent-opens check
The initial scan uses 180 days. After selecting Recipients with no recent opens, the available windows are 90, 180, and 365 days, labeled No opens in the last … days. A longer window targets a smaller, older group of inactive recipients; a shorter window can include more people.
Only confirmed memberships with a valid address qualify for this check. Bounced, suppressed, and unsubscribed recipients are excluded from this group and appear under their own issues instead.
Cedros uses the recipient's most recent recorded email open, which can come from another list or campaign. The selected list limits which memberships you will affect; it does not limit the open history to messages sent to that list.
If no open has ever been recorded, the membership must be older than the selected window before it qualifies. A newly added recipient with no opens is therefore not immediately treated as inactive. If an older open exists, that recorded date is what the check compares with the window.
Consider whether you have actually sent this audience email, whether open tracking has been available, and whether other customer activity suggests continued interest. For example, no opens on a list that has never received a campaign tells you little about whether its members want future messages. Use Viewing a customer's history to review other recorded activity where available.
The day selector appears only after you select the issue. An issue with zero matches is disabled, so a scan with no 180-day matches does not offer that selector through this flow. Do not interpret a zero count as a check of every possible window.
Review the full scope before making changes
The Review the recipients we'll affect step shows the matched total and a preview with Email, List, Membership, and Last open.
Read the total, not just the rows. The table displays up to 100 memberships, but the action applies to every match in the chosen list scope and issue. For example, if 430 memberships match and 100 are shown, selecting Run cleanup applies the chosen action to all 430.
There are no checkboxes for selecting individual recipients in that preview. If some matches should remain untouched, go back to choose a narrower list scope or leave with Back to lists. Do not proceed expecting to select exceptions on the final step.
Review the actual issue as well as the membership label. A confirmed membership can still have a suppression or delivery problem. No opens means no recorded open is available; it is not a reason to override a person's subscription choice.
If the scope is correct, select Continue to choose an action. Nothing has changed yet.
Choose and run the cleanup action
Under How should we handle these recipients?, review the selected action carefully. For invalid or bounced addresses, Suppress these addresses is selected by default when you have permission. For other issues, or without suppression permission, the default is Remove them from sending. You can choose another available action before confirming.
Suppress these addresses adds a block that applies across your site's lists. It is available only for Invalid email addresses and Bounced addresses, with suppression-management permission. Use it when those recipients should be blocked beyond the selected list. Suppressing does not delete the records or necessarily change their displayed list membership status. Clean Lists has no action to lift a suppression.
Remove them from sending retains the selected memberships but makes them ineligible for list-based sends:
- Invalid or bounced memberships become Bounced.
- Suppressed or inactive memberships become Pending.
- Unsubscribed memberships remain Unsubscribed, including when they also match another issue.
This action changes the selected memberships; it does not add a global suppression. It also does not send a confirmation email when a membership becomes Pending. Another membership in a different list is a separate record, so use the scope that matches your intent.
Copy them to a review segment collects recipients into a private, non-sending list and preserves the source memberships. Choose it when you need further investigation before changing sending eligibility. Copying inactive recipients does not stop them receiving email through their original eligible lists. The destination is created or reused for that issue, so it can contain recipients from earlier cleanup runs as well.
To apply your choice:
- Confirm the list scope, issue, and matched count from the review step.
- Select the action you intend to use; do not rely on the default without reading it.
- Select Run cleanup. This is the confirmation that applies the action.
- Wait for the result, then read the reported outcome and counts before leaving or starting another cleanup.
If the matching recipients have changed since you reviewed them, Cedros returns you to a refreshed review instead of applying the stale selection. Inspect the new matches and confirm again only if the scope is still right.
Check the result
For suppression, the completion screen reports the number of new addresses suppressed. That can be lower than the matched membership count because a recipient can occur in several lists or already have an active suppression. No new suppressions needed means no additional block was created; it does not mean that the recipients became eligible to receive email.
For removal from sending, reopen the affected list and check the membership statuses. The contacts and list records remain. A Pending status produced by cleanup is an exclusion from sending, not evidence that a confirmation message was queued.
For a review segment, note the destination name and the number copied. Open it from Lists and review its members. The copied count can be lower than the matched membership count because repeated memberships are combined by contact and some recipient records may not be eligible for copying. Use the completion result rather than assuming every preview row became a separate review entry.
Select Clean another list to begin a fresh scan, or Back to lists to return to the overview. A later scan can still show invalid, bounced, suppressed, or unsubscribed records because cleanup retains them. A review segment is excluded from future cleanup scans, while its original source memberships remain eligible for the relevant checks.
Clean Lists has no one-click Undo. If the wrong recipients were affected, record the list, issue, action, and time, then ask your email administrator to review recovery. Do not bulk-add the recipients back, clear their opt-outs, or treat the review list as a sending audience. Restoring a membership still requires a valid address, appropriate consent, and no blocking preference or suppression.
Troubleshoot an incomplete cleanup
Clean Lists is disabled or suppression is missing. Check your list-management and recipient-detail permissions. Suppression needs additional permission and is only offered for invalid or bounced addresses.
Continue is unavailable. Wait for the current scan or recipient load to finish. Select a list and an issue with matches. If you changed the inactivity window, wait for the new counts; the previous scan is not ready for that choice.
The recipient preview did not load. Read the error and retry the review after resolving it. Cedros should keep you on the issue step rather than let you apply a cleanup without loaded candidates.
The review changed after Run cleanup. New activity, changed membership, or other recipient updates can change the matches. Read the refreshed review and full count before confirming the action again.
The action failed or the result was interrupted. Keep the error details. Reopen the affected lists and check the current state before retrying, especially if the connection ended after you selected Run cleanup. Do not assume either success or failure from a missing completion screen alone.
The same issues appear again. Check whether you retained an exclusion or copied recipients for review. Neither action deletes the original records. Success means the intended sending behavior or review list is correct, not necessarily that every issue count reaches zero.
If you need help, provide the list name, issue, inactivity window if relevant, matched count, selected action, time, and exact error. Avoid sharing a full recipient export. See Getting help with your Cedros site.