Email Invalid

[Deepthi_MS]

Hi,

I am looking for assistance to clean up email invalid records. 

We are also considering to remove the email invalid records in future, any doc on that/ any strategies around that. Please let me know.

Thanks in advance,

Deepthi.

[Sant_Singh_Rath · Accepted solution]

Hi @Deepthi_MS, I am happy to hop on a call to discuss more about your "invalid records cleanup" and help you based on my understanding. Thanks!

[SanfordWhiteman]

@Sant_Singh_Rath let’s keep discussions open on the community, offering off-list contact is against the community guidelines. Thanks!

[Sant_Singh_Rath]

Sure @SanfordWhiteman. I was only trying to help but I respect the community guidelines and will follow that. 

[Deepthi_MS]

@Sant_Singh_Rath - We have about 352500 email invalid records, if we want to delete some of the records from these 352500 records so that we get some space what strategy in place to consider ?.

Thanks,

Deepthi.

[Sant_Singh_Rath]

@Deepthi_MS,  We should be careful here. Simply deleting all invalid email records just to free up space is not always the right move.

First, I suggest we classify these 352,500 records.

For example:

• Hard bounces or permanently invalid emails. These are safe candidates for deletion after confirming they are not needed for compliance or reporting.

• Records with missing or malformed email IDs but still have value from a CRM or historical perspective. These might need to be retained.

Before deleting anything, we should also check:

• Whether these records are linked to active leads, opportunities, or historical campaigns.

• Data retention and compliance requirements.

A safer strategy would be:

1. Create a smart list to isolate truly unusable records like repeated hard bounces and invalid formats.

2. Suppress them globally so they do not impact send limits.

3. Delete in phases, starting with the oldest and clearly non-recoverable records.

4. Track the impact on database size and reporting before proceeding further.

[Michael_Florin]

This topic is way more complex than it looks.

Sure, you could just rely on the fact that Marketo will mark Hard Bounces as "Email Invalid = true" and then create a Smart Campaign that deletes all Email Invalids once a week or so. But there a caveats:

• You might not want to delete all invalid records. 
• There are records that are not invalid, but you still will want to get rid of them.

So I would encourage everyone to create a solid view on your bounce situation in general and then look closer at what you want to do with them. Build a "Bounce House":

https://nation.marketo.com/t5/knowledgebase/maintaining-a-directory-of-leads-bouncing-emails/ta-p/30...