List hygiene
Your recipient list is the single biggest input to your deliverability. Mailbox providers watch how recipients react to your mail, and two signals hurt the most: hard bounces (the address doesn't exist — a sign of bad or stale data) and spam complaints (the recipient marked your mail as junk — a sign it wasn't wanted). Senders with high bounce or complaint rates look like they bought a list or never asked permission, and providers respond by filtering more of their mail to spam. Sustained bad rates can also trigger Bird's own protections, throttling or pausing your sending until the problem is addressed. Keeping the list clean is how you stay out of that territory.
What Bird handles for you
Bird automatically suppresses addresses that hard-bounce or file a spam complaint: they're added to your workspace's suppression list, and future sends to them are blocked before they leave the platform. You never keep mailing a dead address or someone who reported you, even if the address is still sitting in your own database. Unsubscribes are suppressed the same way for marketing mail.
Suppressed recipients are visibly rejected rather than silently dropped, so you can always see which addresses were blocked and why. You can browse and manage the list in the dashboard; the technical details are in the suppressions guide.
What you should do yourself
Automatic suppression catches the addresses that have already gone bad. The part Bird can't do for you is removing recipients who are quietly losing interest:
- Send only to people who opted in. Purchased, scraped, or very old lists are where bounces and complaints come from. If someone didn't ask for your mail, don't send it.
- Honor unsubscribes immediately. Bird blocks future marketing sends to anyone who unsubscribes, but make sure your own systems mirror that — re-importing an old list shouldn't resurrect addresses that opted out.
- Prune chronically unengaged recipients. Someone who hasn't opened or clicked anything in many months is a deliverability liability: at best they ignore you, and at worst their address has been turned into a spam trap. Either run a re-engagement campaign and remove non-responders, or simply stop mailing them. A smaller, engaged list outperforms a big, quiet one.
- Review your suppression list periodically. It tells you where your data is going stale. A steady stream of hard bounces from one signup source, for example, points to a form that needs validation or confirmation.
A simple routine
- Before any large send, ask where each segment of the list came from and when those people last engaged.
- After the send, check your bounce and complaint rates on the Metrics page — see sender reputation monitoring for what good looks like.
- Every few months, define your own inactivity cutoff (for example, no opens or clicks in six months), try once to re-engage those recipients, and remove the ones who stay silent.
Related pages
- Sender reputation monitoring — the bounce and complaint thresholds to watch
- Suppressions — the full technical contract for the suppression list