ListDefender

Overview

ListDefender keeps your list organized by tagging every contact with one of three tags:

Green (Send Responsibly)

These contacts are safe to email. They are deliverable, engaged and meet your configured email quality checks.
Yellow (Re-Engage)

These contacts are deliverable and passed your configured email quality checks, but they do not meet the minimum engagement threshold. You should consider re-engaging them.
Red (Do Not Send)

These contacts are not safe to email. They are either undeliverable, unengaged or failed your configured email quality checks.

When you first register, ListDefender presents a series of options that allow you to fine tune how ListDefender makes this decision. There are three types of details ListDefender considers as part of scanning a contact: Email Validity, Quality and Engagement.

Valid Email Check

ListDefender performs a series of tests to ensure that an email address is deliverable. For most email providers, we can accurately determine if an address is deliverable or if sending mail to it will result in a bounce. If an email address is not deliverable, ListDefender will mark the contact as Red (Do Not Send). These tests are not configurable, but you can apply a tag that indicates the reason a contact failed the Valid Email Check (See Additional Options.)

Additionally, you can choose to enable the option to opt out contacts that fail the Valid Email Check. When enabled, ListDefender will automatically opt out (in your CRM) contacts that fail the Valid Email Check. These are contacts are not deliverable. We recommend enabling this option.

Email Quality Check

ListDefender has 7 quality tests available. These are:

Disposable Address

ListDefender can detect when an email address is disposable (temporary). After some period, these email addresses expire and are purged, meaning that any email sent to it will often bounce. Disposable addresses are very low quality leads, and emailing them is risky.
Vulgar Term

ListDefender can detect when a contact's name or email address contain English vulgar terms. Contacts whose email address or name contains vulgar terms are typically low quality, high risk leads.
Suspicious Term

Similar to the Vulgar Term test, ListDefender can detect when a contact's name or email address contain English suspicious terms, like "spam" or "do not email". Contacts whose email address or name contain suspicious terms are typically low quality, high risk leads.
Domain Role

ListDefender can detect role-based email addresses. These are addresses that represent a job or role in a company, like billing@ or sales@. Sending marketing content to role-based addresses is risky, because they are often used by multiple people or teams, and they typically don't opt in to receive emails.
Email Tag

ListDefender can detect when an address contains a tag (email+tag@gmail.com). This isn't a strong indicator of risk.
Free Address

ListDefender can detect when an address is from a free email address provider (Gmail, Hotmail, iCloud, etc). This isn't a strong indicator of risk.
Catch-all Domain

Catch-all email addresses are fallback addresses that receive all email a domain receives that isn't otherwise attached to a mailbox. ListDefender can sometimes detect when an address belongs to a catch-all domain. This does not indicate that a particular email address is the catch-all address. This isn't a strong indicator of risk.

You can also choose to enable the option to opt out contacts that fail the Email Quality Check. When enabled, ListDefender will automatically opt out (in your CRM) contacts that fail any of the Email Quality Checks that you enable. This option is only recommended after you have a clear understanding of the impact each check has on your list.

Engagement

Using data from your CRM, ListDefender can identify which of your contacts are engaged, un-engaged and those that need you should re-engage. ListDefender exposes some options that let you influence how contacts' engagement is evaluated, including engagement thresholds for engaged and un-engaged. The re-engage thresholds are automatically inferred from the engaged and un-engaged thresholds.

You can also choose to enable the option to opt out contacts that haven't engaged within the number of days you specify for the red engagement threshold. When enabled, ListDefender will automatically opt out (in your CRM) contacts that have not engaged with your emails for the period you configured. This option is only recommended after you have a good understanding of your engagement data.

Additional Options

There are a few additional settings that you can configure to fine-tune how ListDefender works:

Email Field for Checks

Select which of your contact's email fields ListDefender should use in the scan. The most common reason to select a different field is if you're using a third-party service to deliver emails, and your contact's actual email address is in a non-standard field.
Engagement Tracking Method

Your CRM tracks when someone clicks on a link in your emails, and this is a very good way to track customer engagement. Your CRM also tracks when someone opens your emails, but this isn't very reliable because many email systems block or erroneously report opens.
Though the "Clicks Only" option is the most accurate for engagement tracking, ListDefender recommends that you start with "Clicks and Opens" until you have a good understanding of your engagement data.
Engagement Date Storage (last sent, last click and last open)

You can optionally store different engagement metric dates (last sent, last click and last open). The options here may vary, depending on which data is made available by your CRM. These values are updated each time a scan is run.
Automatically Correct Typos

ListDefender can detect and correct typos in email address domains. When the option to automatically fix typos is enabled, ListDefender will only perform the update if the original address is non-deliverable, and the corrected address is deliverable. If the original address is deliverable, ListDefender will not update the address.
Tag contacts with the reason they failed the Valid Email Check

ListDefender does a series of checks to determine if an email address is valid. When enabled, ListDefender will apply a tag for the specific reason that a contact failed the Valid Email Check.
Tag contacts for each Email Quality Check they fail

ListDefender does a series of checks as part of the Email Quality Checks. When enabled, ListDefender will apply a tag for each Quality Email Check that a contact fails.
Tag contacts based on the Email Address Provider

ListDefender will determine the email provider and tag the contact indicating if the email is hosted by Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Yahoo. If the provider isn't one of those, the provider tag will be "Other Email Provider".