How does sending emails to inactive B2B addresses affect email deliverability?

Email marketer from Sendinblue Blog shares that low engagement rates, often caused by sending to inactive addresses, signal to mailbox providers that your emails are not valuable, resulting in deliverability issues and placement in the spam folder.

Email marketer from Litmus responds that tracking deliverability metrics like bounce rate and engagement can help identify issues caused by sending to inactive addresses. High bounce rates and low engagement negatively impact your sender reputation.

Email marketer from Email on Acid responds that sending emails to people who haven't opted in or are no longer active violates permission-based marketing principles, hurting your reputation and deliverability.

Marketer from Email Geeks shares that some B2B filters (e.g., Mimecast) will automatically convert retired addresses into spam traps, influencing their global filtering decisions.

Email marketer from Neil Patel's Blog explains that cleaning your email list removes inactive subscribers, which improves your sender reputation and deliverability by reducing bounce rates and increasing engagement rates.

Marketer from Email Geeks shares an anecdote about a sender being blocked due to a client's IT policy of not returning undeliverable address bounces, leading to the sender exceeding undeliverable rate thresholds. The IT team cleaned the sender's list of expired addresses and reset the block.

Email marketer from Reddit (r/emailmarketing) explains that in B2B, sending to outdated email addresses (employees who have left the company) will increase bounce rates and can significantly hurt your sender reputation over time, causing deliverability problems.

Email marketer from GMass shares that when cold emailing in the B2B sector sending to bad/old emails will severely impact your cold email deliverability - resulting in Google flagging your emails as spam. Therefore, it is imperative to have a well researched and 'clean' email list.

Email marketer from Mailchimp responds that maintaining list hygiene by removing inactive subscribers improves deliverability. Sending to engaged contacts protects your sender reputation and ensures your emails reach the inbox.

Email marketer from Validity (formerly ReturnPath) shares that hitting spam traps, often associated with sending to inactive addresses, severely damages your sender reputation and can lead to blacklisting.

Expert from Word to the Wise explains that sending to invalid email addresses costs you money, pollutes your data, and damages your deliverability through an increased risk of blacklisting or filtering.

Expert from Word to the Wise shares that sending to old, inactive addresses will lead to bounces and spam complaints, which negatively impacts your sender reputation and deliverability.

Expert from Email Geeks suggests that if the IT group has chosen to leave the address accepting mail they’re not going to care that mail that was asked for is still being delivered to it and because it’s enterprise, so they’re not going to be looking at engagement. It’s a little wasteful of resources, and I can see it might affect your metrics, but I doubt there’s a deliverability aspect.

Expert from Spam Resource explains that one definition of spam is unsolicited bulk email, which includes sending to inactive addresses that have not opted-in or engaged with your emails.

Expert from Email Geeks explains that if an IT team identifies a high volume of invalid addresses, they might block the sender. Matt also suggests monitoring engagement metrics and suppressing non-engaging recipients.

Documentation from RFC answers that adhering to SMTP standards is paramount and that constantly failing to deliver your email to live inboxes will have a dramatic impact on your deliverability.

Documentation from Microsoft explains that sending emails to old, unused addresses increases the likelihood of hitting spam traps and being filtered as spam. Keeping your lists up-to-date and removing inactive addresses is essential for avoiding spam filters.

Documentation from Google Postmaster Tools explains that a sender's reputation is a critical factor in email deliverability. Sending to inactive addresses can harm your reputation, leading to more emails being marked as spam.

Documentation from Spamhaus explains that sending to spam traps and maintaining poor list hygiene are key factors that can lead to being blocklisted, severely impacting email deliverability.