How to Create a List of Unsubscribes or Bounces

How do you remove bounces and unsubscribes from your active mailing list?

A bounce occurs when an email is undeliverable to a particular recipient. Emails normally bounce because the address is invalid, meaning the address may no longer exist; perhaps someone left their job or canceled their email account.

An unsubscribe is a little more straightforward: someone signed up to receive your messages, then changed their mind for whatever reason and opted to not receive them anymore. Deleting both bounces and unsubscribes is something you can do to purge (clean up) your email list of unmailable addresses. To do this, just follow these directions (in your VerticalResponse account):

• Click Lists up in the blue toolbar
• Then the Actions link that corresponds to your Master List
• Select Download Members
• Next, select Download Unsubscribes and/or Download Bounces, which will be the list of individuals you ultimately want to remove.
• Download the .CSV version

Open the file when you receive it in your inbox, and delete all the columns that aren’t the email addresses you want to remove, as well as the headers, including the header that says "Email." Save this file on your computer.

In this next set of steps, we’ll actually delete the addresses we just downloaded. Click “Lists” again, then click “Master List,” and then “Mass Update.” Next click "Browse" and find the file you just saved. Now we’re going to remove these addresses from your account (we’ll save their status as bounced or unsubscribed on the back-end of your account in case you accidently upload them again). Click “Delete from Account,” then “Process File” and “Done.”