How to Use Emailable to Clean a Mailchimp Audience

The short answer: before a campaign to a 10,000-contact Mailchimp audience, Emailable verifies it for $60 in pay-as-you-go credits (pricing page, checked on 26 October 2026), and the step that needs your attention is not the check but the export back, because the preset you pick decides who stays subscribed. The steps: take a placement baseline with an inbox report, connect Mailchimp, verify the audience, read the five results, choose the export deliberately, let an agent re-check the unknowns a few days later, then send within 24 hours and run a second report.

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The case for checking is simple. An address that bounced once will bounce again, and every hard bounce tells the receiving providers that the sender does not look after the list. The case for care is less obvious: an export from Emailable changes subscription status in Mailchimp. For what Emailable includes and costs, see the Emailable glossary entry.

Before you connect Mailchimp:

1. Work out the credits. For example, a 10,000-contact audience uses 10,000 credits, $60 on the pricing page, and Unknown results and duplicates are returned to the balance when the list finishes. The 250 free credits every account starts with pay for two inbox reports at 100 credits each.
2. Keep the original. Export the audience from Mailchimp as a CSV before anything else. Once the export in step 5 runs, that file is your record of who was subscribed.
3. Take two baselines. The bounce rate of the last campaign to this audience, and the inbox report from step 1. The same two numbers after the send tell you whether the clean did anything.

What you need

• An Emailable account and a Mailchimp login that can authorise apps.
• A test campaign in Mailchimp you can send to a small seed audience.
• For step 6, Claude Code, Codex or another agent that runs in a terminal.

Step 1: Take a placement baseline with an inbox report

In Emailable, click Deliverability at the top right, then Create Inbox Report, and download the seed list as a CSV, as the inbox report docs describe. Add the seed addresses to Mailchimp as their own small audience and send your usual campaign email to all of them as a regular campaign, not an A/B test. The report appears within a few minutes: placement at Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo, SPF, DKIM and DMARC results, a SpamAssassin score, link and image checks, and blacklists. Emailable waits up to 24 hours for the email to arrive, after which you start a new report.

Step 2: Connect Mailchimp

Click Get Started, or + New List if you have verified a list before, and choose Mailchimp as the source. Sign in to Mailchimp and grant Emailable permission, per the Mailchimp integration docs.

Step 3: Verify the audience

Select the audience from the list Emailable shows, click Verify and watch the counts come in. You can read results while the rest of the list is still processing. When it finishes, click View Results.

Step 4: Read the five results

The results docs define them:

• Deliverable: the address exists and accepts mail. Keep it.
• Risky: may be valid, with doubts on quality or deliverability, such as accept-all domains or role addresses. Your call, by list.
• Undeliverable: bad syntax, a dead domain or a mailbox the server rejects. Remove it.
• Unknown: the server did not answer in time, often temporarily. Not charged, and not to be treated as bad.
• Duplicate: the same address twice in the list, processed once.

Step 5: Choose the export as a subscription decision

On the results page, open the Exports tab, click New Export and choose what to send to Mailchimp. The Mailchimp docs state the rule plainly: the selected addresses go to your chosen list, and every other address on that list is unsubscribed.

Before sending anything back, download the full results as a file; the bulk verifier docs allow as many exports from one list as you like. For an audience you mail every month, Maximum Reach removes the dead addresses and leaves the judgment calls in place. For an old audience, or a new sending domain, Maximum Deliverability is the stricter choice. By the docs' own rule, sending Only Bad Emails to the same audience would keep the bad addresses and unsubscribe the good ones, so use that preset as a download for a suppression list.

Step 6: Let an agent re-check the unknowns

Unknown results often come from greylisting or a busy server, and the results docs suggest verifying them again later. Download the Unknown addresses as unknowns.csv and, a few days on, hand them to an agent. Install Emailable's command-line tool with the script on its AI agents page, run emailable once to sign in through the browser, and accept the offer to install the skill for Claude Code.

Then ask: "Verify the emails in unknowns.csv and tell me which ones are now Deliverable." The agent runs emailable batch verify unknowns.csv --wait --json, reads the results and reports. A person decides what happens next: a subscriber who left Mailchimp in step 5 should not be put back without checking that they gave consent in the first place, so the agent's list is a proposal, not an import.

Step 7: Send within 24 hours, then run the second report

Send the campaign within 24 hours of verifying. That window is one condition of the guarantee: no more than 1% of Deliverable addresses should bounce, 3% at Microsoft, on an opt-in list of at least 1,000, with any claim made within 72 hours. Then run a second inbox report with the same email and compare it with the first.

How to know it worked

The campaign's bounce rate falls against the baseline, and the second inbox report shows the same or better placement at the providers your audience uses. If Deliverable addresses bounced as invalid beyond the guarantee's line, collect the bounces and claim within the 72 hours.

What the docs warn about

• The unsubscribe rule. Every address not in the export is unsubscribed from the Mailchimp list.
• A/B tests and missing seeds. Inbox reports need the full seed list and a regular send; a split test leaves addresses out.
• The 30-day clock. Uploaded lists are deleted for good 30 days after upload.
• Unknown is not Undeliverable. The results docs ask you to keep unknowns as their own segment rather than delete them.

When credits run low, Emailable offers Auto-Refill, and the worked example in its Auto-Refill docs buys 20,000 credits every time the balance falls below 5,000; a vendor's example sets a top-up four times the trigger, so size yours from the lists you plan to check, not from the example.

FAQ

Am I charged for Unknown results?

No. Credits spent on Unknown results and on duplicates are returned to your balance when the list finishes verifying, per the pricing page.

How long does verification take?

The pricing page FAQ puts a 10,000-address list at under 3 minutes in most cases and 250,000 at about 7 minutes, depending on the domains in it.

Can I test placement without verifying a list?

Yes. Inbox reports are a separate tool and cost 100 credits each, per the credits docs.