Jimmy Kim explains why reusing old email lists is dangerous: a single spam trap or bad address can get you blocklisted by Spamhaus, causing days of sending disruption. He shares a story of someone who reactivated old leads, hit a trap, and spent weeks recovering deliverability.
It only takes one bad email, one pristine spam trap that you might trip over because you got a bad lead somewhere that you picked up because you didn't do a good job doing this, or you added a lead back into your thing because you picked up some old list from somewhere you wanted to reactivate. And ultimately you hit a bad spam trap. They throw you on Spamhaus, for example, and for the next 24, 48 hours or even longer, you may not be able to send. I actually had someone reach out recently. They're like, how do I fix this? I said, dude, what did you do? And he goes, well, you know, I had these old leads that I kind of had and I wanted to load them up and send them an email. And I was like, wasn't worth it, dude. Now you're gonna have to reverse it. You're gonna have to go show this, the spam provider, that you did a good job. And ultimately, I don't know if they've ever figured it out, but it's a big headache for very little positive results. Subscribe to the pod.
