How do I recover email deliverability after sending to a purchased list?
Matthew Whittaker
Co-founder & CTO, Suped
Published 8 Jul 2025
Updated 16 Aug 2025
6 min read
Sending emails to a purchased list can severely damage your email deliverability and sender reputation. This often leads to high bounce rates, spam complaints, and even blacklisting, making it incredibly difficult for your legitimate emails to reach the inbox. It's a common, yet critical, mistake that requires immediate and strategic intervention to fix.
Recovering from such an incident isn't a quick fix, but a methodical process that prioritizes cleaning up the damage and rebuilding trust with internet service providers (ISPs). My goal is to guide you through the necessary steps to restore your email sending health.
Damage control and list hygiene
The immediate aftermath of sending to a purchased list often involves high hard bounces, low engagement, and a surge in spam complaints. These are direct signals to ISPs that your sending practices are poor, leading to a rapid decline in your sender reputation. The first and most critical step is to halt all marketing sends to prevent further damage.
The problem: purchased lists
High bounce rates: Purchased lists frequently contain invalid or inactive email addresses, leading to an immediate spike in hard bounces. This is a strong negative signal to ISPs.
Spam traps: These lists often include spam traps, which are email addresses used by ISPs and blocklist operators to identify senders of unsolicited mail. Hitting a spam trap can result in immediate blacklisting.
Low engagement and high complaints: Recipients on purchased lists haven't opted in to receive your emails, leading to low open and click-through rates, and a high likelihood of marking your emails as spam.
Your primary goal should be to isolate the problem. This means thoroughly cleaning your email list to remove any problematic addresses. Start by identifying and removing all hard bounces and known spam trap addresses. If your ESP (Email Service Provider) provides data on spam complaints, use it to suppress those users immediately. For a deeper understanding of why these lists cause issues, you can review this article on why purchased email lists cause deliverability problems.
Assessing and monitoring your reputation
After stopping the problematic sends and cleaning your list, the next step is to assess the damage to your sender reputation. Your IP and domain reputation are crucial factors that determine whether your emails land in the inbox or the spam folder. A sudden influx of bad sends will significantly reduce your score.
You should check your domain and IP addresses against major blocklists (or blacklists), as being listed on one can prevent your emails from reaching recipients. Tools like the Suped blocklist checker can help you determine your status. If you are blocklisted, you will need to follow the specific delisting procedures for each blocklist. Understanding what happens when your domain is on an email blacklist is crucial.
Google Postmaster Tools (and similar tools from other ISPs) provide valuable insights into your domain and IP reputation, spam rate, and delivery errors. Monitoring these dashboards will be key to tracking your recovery progress. Look for trends in your spam complaints and bounce rates to ensure they are decreasing after your clean-up efforts.
Rebuilding trust and reputation
Once you have addressed the immediate issues, the long road to rebuilding your deliverability begins. This involves a strategic approach to re-engaging your actual permission-based list and demonstrating consistent, positive sending behavior to ISPs. Avoid sending to the purchased list again at all costs. Instead, focus on re-engaging stale subscribers and nurturing your legitimate audience.
Start with your most engaged segments and gradually increase your sending volume over time. This process, often called IP warming (even if you're using a shared IP, it helps your domain reputation), helps ISPs recognize your sending patterns as legitimate. You might also want to review your overall email reputation and deliverability practices.
Email authentication standards, such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, are more important than ever. Ensure these are correctly configured for your sending domains. Proper authentication proves to ISPs that your emails are legitimate and not spoofed, which is vital for rebuilding trust. Use a DMARC record generator tool to set up your DMARC record correctly and DMARC monitoring to keep an eye on your authentication results.
Also, focus on email content quality. Avoid spammy language, excessive capitalization, or too many images. Ensure your emails are relevant and valuable to your subscribers. Personalization can help improve engagement, which in turn boosts your sender reputation. For instance, Mailgun emphasizes list hygiene and domain authentication as critical steps for improving sender reputation.
Prevention and long-term strategy
To prevent future deliverability issues, implementing strict, permission-based list acquisition practices is essential. This means only sending to recipients who have explicitly opted in to receive your communications. Double opt-in is the gold standard, as it verifies the email address and confirms the subscriber's intent.
Regularly clean your email list to remove unengaged subscribers, inactive addresses, and duplicates. Even after an initial purge, ongoing list hygiene is vital for maintaining a healthy sender reputation. An unengaged list can still negatively impact your deliverability, even if it's not a purchased list. For more on this, consider why you might still have deliverability issues after cleaning your email list.
Consistency in sending volume and frequency also plays a role in maintaining a good reputation. Avoid large, sporadic blasts. Instead, aim for a steady sending cadence that your subscribers expect and that ISPs can reliably assess. This predictability contributes positively to your email deliverability. Constant Contact highlights why purchased email lists should be avoided and replaced with strategic efforts.
Ethical sending practices vs. high-risk methods
Permission-based lists: Build lists through opt-ins, sign-up forms, and confirmed consent.
Regular cleaning: Periodically remove unengaged subscribers, hard bounces, and invalid addresses to maintain list quality.
Consistent volume: Maintain a steady sending schedule to build and protect your sender reputation over time.
Views from the trenches
Best practices
Always prioritize building an opt-in list over purchasing one to ensure high engagement and maintain a strong sender reputation.
Implement a double opt-in process for all new subscribers to verify their email addresses and confirm consent.
Regularly monitor your email deliverability metrics, including open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and spam complaints.
Segment your email lists based on engagement levels and send targeted content to improve relevancy and engagement.
Warm up new IPs or domains gradually before sending large volumes of emails to establish a positive sending history.
Ensure all email authentication protocols (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) are correctly configured and monitored.
Provide clear and easy-to-find unsubscribe options in every email to reduce spam complaints.
Personalize your email content to increase recipient engagement and build stronger relationships.
Common pitfalls
Sending to purchased or rented email lists will invariably lead to poor deliverability and potential blacklisting.
Ignoring high bounce rates and continuing to send to invalid email addresses will further damage your sender reputation.
Failing to implement proper email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) will result in emails being marked as spam or rejected.
Not regularly cleaning your email list of unengaged or inactive subscribers will negatively impact engagement metrics.
Sending inconsistent or excessively high volumes of emails can trigger spam filters and cause reputation issues.
Ignoring spam complaints or making it difficult for recipients to unsubscribe will lead to increased negative feedback.
Using generic or spammy subject lines and content can reduce open rates and increase spam classifications.
Failing to warm up a new IP or domain before sending large volumes can result in immediate blocking.
Expert tips
Segment your list carefully and prioritize sending to your most engaged subscribers first when recovering.
A gradual approach to increasing sending volume is crucial after a reputation hit; think marathon, not sprint.
Always maintain a strict zero-tolerance policy for purchased lists to protect your long-term deliverability.
Proactively removing unengaged subscribers can prevent them from becoming spam traps or complaint sources.
Leverage DMARC reports to identify authentication failures and unauthorized sending sources quickly.
Consider setting up a separate domain for cold outreach if that's a necessary part of your strategy, to protect your primary domain.
Implement a feedback loop with major ISPs to automatically receive spam complaints and act on them swiftly.
Analyze email client and device usage to optimize your content for responsiveness and readability across platforms.
Expert view
Expert from Email Geeks says that the first step is to completely remove the purchased list. You should only send to recently engaged and properly permissioned email addresses until your domain reputation recovers.
April 7, 2022 - Email Geeks
Marketer view
Marketer from Email Geeks says that they are concerned about sales teams purchasing more lists or sending emails too early. They wonder if it's better to fully delete problematic contacts or just put them on a suppression list.
April 7, 2022 - Email Geeks
The path forward for deliverability
Recovering email deliverability after sending to a purchased list is a challenging, but achievable, process. It requires immediate action, a thorough clean-up, and a commitment to rebuilding a strong sender reputation through ethical practices.
By pausing sends, aggressively cleaning your lists, ensuring proper authentication, and adopting a long-term strategy of permission-based marketing and continuous monitoring, you can gradually restore your email program's health and ensure your messages consistently reach the inbox.
Google Postmaster Tools (and similar tools from other ISPs) provide valuable insights into your domain and IP reputation, spam rate, and delivery errors. Monitoring these dashboards will be key to tracking your recovery progress. Look for trends in your spam complaints and bounce rates to ensure they are decreasing after your clean-up efforts.
