---

How to verify and clean up your Mailchimp email list?

To verify and clean a Mailchimp email list, connect OOPSpam to your Mailchimp account, scan your audience against OOPSpam’s spam database, and unsubscribe or delete whatever comes back flagged as risky. OOPSpam’s Mailchimp integration does this directly inside your audience, with no CSV exports and no manual cross-referencing.

Step 1: Find the Mailchimp Integration

From your OOPSpam Dashboard, click Integrations in the left sidebar. Mailchimp is listed alongside the other available integrations. Click Connect on the Mailchimp card.

Step 2: Connect with Your Mailchimp API Key

You’ll be asked for your Mailchimp API key. To get one, go to your Mailchimp account and navigate to Account → Extras → API keys.

Paste it into the field and click Connect.

Step 3: Pick an Audience to Scan

After connecting, OOPSpam fetches your Mailchimp audiences along with their subscriber counts. Click the audience you want to check.

Step 4: Fine-Tune What Counts as Risky (optional)

You’ll see a preview of the contacts in your selected audience before the scan runs. OOPSpam checks each address against its spam database to identify risky emails.

Before you scan, you can flag extra situations under Additional risk criteria. Both sit on the same screen as the contact preview and are optional.

• Soft bounced flags any contact whose most recent send came back as a soft bounce, since repeated soft bounces are an early warning sign of a dying address.
• Never opened the last 3 emails flags contacts who haven’t opened your last three campaigns. This needs open tracking enabled in Mailchimp, and without it the results may not be accurate.

Step 5: Filter by IP Address (optional)

Further down the same screen, IP-based filters let you flag contacts by where and how they signed up. This section only appears if Mailchimp exposes each contact’s IP address.

• Block VPN / Proxy / Tor IPs flags signups that came through anonymizing services, a common pattern for fake or scraped addresses.
• Block data center IPs flags signups originating from server infrastructure rather than a real person’s device.

You can also set Allowed countries and Blocked countries to restrict scans to the regions you actually market to. Like the risk criteria above, IP-based filtering adds extra checks and can slow down scan time.

Click Scan All Emails when ready. Turning other options on adds extra checks to the scan, so expect it to take a bit longer than a standard scan. 

For larger audiences, the scan runs in two steps: first loading all contacts, then scanning them. Either way, the process runs automatically.

Note: scanning uses your OOPSpam API credits.

Step 6: Review and Act on Risky Contacts

Once the scan finishes, results are displayed in three summary cards:

• Total Scanned, every address checked
• Clean, addresses that passed
• Risky, addresses flagged as suspicious or harmful

All risky contacts appear in a list below, each tagged Spam, with individual action buttons. For each one you can:

• Unsubscribe, removes the contact from this audience only; they remain in your Mailchimp account
• Delete, permanently removes the contact from your Mailchimp account entirely

To handle them in bulk, use the buttons at the top of the list:

• Select All or Unselect All to adjust which contacts are checked
• Unsubscribe Selected to unsubscribe all checked contacts from the audience
• Delete Selected to permanently delete all checked contacts from your account

Step 7: Done! Audience Cleaned

Once you confirm the bulk action, the risky count drops and a success message appears. Repeat the scan periodically, since new risky contacts accumulate every time your audience grows.

Why Bother Cleaning Your Mailchimp List?

Most email problems do not announce themselves. They build up quietly. A few reasons to scan regularly:

• Bounce rates rise when invalid addresses accumulate, hurting your sender score.
• Spam traps get added to lists through scraped or purchased contacts. Hitting one can get your domain flagged.
• Engagement metrics become unreliable when a chunk of your audience cannot or will not open anything.
• Mailchimp charges by contact count, so removing dead contacts keeps your costs in check.

A clean list means your campaigns reach real people and your stats reflect reality. Connect OOPSpam to Mailchimp once, and run a scan whenever your audience needs it. No imports, no spreadsheets, no manual cross-referencing.