Exactly - we maintain an internal list of domains and addresses that shouldn’t be on any email list.

We can then compare imports to it to gauge whether or not the imported list appears to have been properly managed.

While this isn’t the only criteria we use to evaluate imports - our Customer Solutions Team manually reviews them as well - it’s one of a number of automated measures that help us to maximize all users’ email deliverability.

Thanks much also for your feedback on how we might improve the imports page - I can see how that could help make transitioning to AWeber even smoother - and we certainly want to do that

Thanks for the detailed reply. I do understand why Aweber wouldn’t want to import a list with too many undeliverables, and I see what you mean about ‘cleaning’. I have a lot of respect for your firmness on this - I moved to Aweber for its better delivery rates, after all.

The only reason I had a problem with the changeover was that I had no advance warning that I might not be able to import my list. Since I followed exactly the kind of procedure you suggest in your post, I had a lot of confused people waiting for a confirmation email I’d told them to expect, but couldn’t send. To clarify, I didn’t send them a ‘reminder’; I had to send them an alternative way to sign up, and an apology for the mess!

So a simple note in the help files would save your new customers this kind of embarrassment. Something like -
"If your list is old and hasn’t been well managed, you may not be able to import any email addresses. If you’re not sure whether your list will qualify to be imported…"
… and then tell people how they can check whether it’ll work, before they start following the (excellent) advice in your post.

While I disgree with your advice to our readers, I appreciate you sharing your experience. Not only will it give me a few things to think about modifying in our help materials, but it also brings up the importance of proper list management.

ISPs look at many factors when determining whether to deliver email from a sender to the inbox or bulk folder (or neither), and your bounce rate is one of those factors. An email solution that doesn’t automatically manage/remove undeliverables will cause issues not only while using them, but if/when you ever decide to move your list elsewhere (as you’ve noted).

"Cleaning" a list would involve emailing the list, in which case you risk the same bounces you’d be looking to avoid. While an email service such as ours may be able to identify some known "dead" addresses in advance and prevent those from being emailed, it won’t know all of them. "Cleaning" is just not something we can in good faith recommend, because of the potential damage to your deliverability that goes along with it.

Sending a reminder, while it appears to have helped in this specific scenario, isn’t something we advise either, because of the high risk of spam complaints - and accusations that you’re not truly using a Confirmed Opt-In model, like in an example discussed on this blog.

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Picking an email marketing solution is an important decision for any business. No matter whether you end up going with AWeber or another company, make sure you choose a solution that manages undeliverables, supports industry standards such as Confirmed Opt-In, and actually gets your email delivered.

The consequences of choosing a solution that leaves you with an improperly managed list can follow you, making migration more challenging. However, in the event of a list where bounces have been handled, I still feel the points made in this post are valid, as they do help smooth the transition from one email solution to another.

If you respect your lists, your lists will respect and continue to do business with you!

I made this mistake - and then when I tried to import the list to Aweber, I was told that too many of the emails on the list were defunct, and so *none* of the subscribers could be imported.

Of course Aweber doesn’t want to send emails to defunct addresses - that’s a Good Thing. So I asked for help removing the old addresses from the list. (Aweber’s system had identified these, of course, but I didn’t know which they were.) This was refused. I asked for advice on how to clean the list in general - again, nothing doing.

So I had a few thousand people waiting for a confirmation email I’d told them to look out for, and that I couldn’t send. In the end I managed to import most of a more recent subset of my list, and had to send another message through my old system: if you didn’t see the confirmation email, here’s a link to a subscription form, sorry.

I had several emails from puzzled subscribers - I’m still getting them, months later - and naturally ‘mislaid’ many subscribers. I’d have done much better to forget about importing altogether, and simply ask my subscribers to sign up at a new subscription form. And if I’d just checked, first, whether I could import my list, that’s exactly what I would have done.

Moral of this story: first import your list into Aweber. Then when you know whether that’s worked, use your old system to tell them how the changeover will work.

My pleasure - I’m glad it’s more usable for you