What is the risk of sending email to inactive users?

Email marketer from Litmus explains that email client filtering is becoming more sophisticated with engagement being a key factor.

Marketer from Email Geeks explains that if they send to their inactives they will likely burn their sending reputation to the ground.

Email marketer from Mailjet explains that sending to inactive users can significantly harm your sender reputation, leading ISPs to view your emails as spam and blocking them.

Email marketer from HubSpot answers that inactive email addresses may have turned into spam traps, which are used by ISPs and blacklist providers to identify spammers. Sending to these addresses can immediately damage your sender reputation.

Email marketer from Campaign Monitor shares that sending to inactive users lowers your engagement metrics, such as open rates and click-through rates, which ISPs use to gauge the quality of your emails.

Email marketer from ActiveCampaign answers that it's risky to send to old lists as you need to ensure you are CAN-SPAM compliant.

Email marketer from Reddit user u/EmailExpert shares that sending to a large list of inactives looks similar to 'list bombing' – a tactic spammers use. This can trigger aggressive filtering by ISPs.

Marketer from Email Geeks states that there is a wide warfront line between having a 5-months strategy to reengage inactive subscribers in a 1.5M list - and pushing out a campaign to 3 million people, most of whom have long forgotten why they gave you the address in the first place.

Email marketer from SendGrid explains that sending to inactive users is a waste of resources. Maintain proper list hygiene and only email active users.

Marketer from Email Geeks says that this isn't a matter of saying that this send will go poorly, but that this send and future sends will go poorly.

Marketer from Email Geeks warns that is a dangerous article to cite.

Email marketer from Email Marketing Forum user MailGuru responds that it can causes deliverability to plummet – especially if those addresses are old and likely to result in hard bounces or spam complaints.

Marketer from Email Geeks shares to pull some ROI data from the regular email campaigns and tell them if they proceed with sending to a barely active 3M database - they will be kissing these ROI money goodbye for a few months

Expert from SpamResource shares that decreased engagement rates, such as opens and clicks, caused by sending to inactives signal to mailbox providers that your mail is unwanted, leading to filtering and placement in the junk folder.

Expert from Word to the Wise explains that sending to inactive addresses can cause significant negative impact on deliverability because those addresses can be recycled into spam traps, or are simply disengaged users who will mark your messages as spam.

Expert from SpamResource explains that sending to inactive users greatly increases the chances of hitting spam traps and incurring recipient complaints, both of which damage your sender reputation and decrease deliverability.

Documentation from Spamhaus answers that sending to old lists will include spam traps which will causes IP address to get listed on blocklists.

Documentation from Google Postmaster Tools details that high spam rates, often caused by sending to old or unengaged addresses, can negatively impact your ability to reach Gmail users' inboxes. Google actively monitors spam complaints.

Documentation from Microsoft SNDS mentions that sending to inactive users increases bounce rates and spam complaints, which negatively impacts your IP reputation and deliverability to Outlook.com, Hotmail, and other Microsoft email services.

Documentation from RFC 5321 responds that sending to inactive email address generates bounces which if the rate is high enough, can cause your server to be blacklisted.

Documentation from AWS SES notes that sender behaviour is a key factor for sending reputation, sending to inactive users is poor sending behaviour.