Keep your Braze audience clean before the first send bounces
Braze marks a hard-bounced address invalid and stops sending to it, so it reacts to a known-bad address after the first failure - but it can't judge an address before that first send. And Braze is API- and SDK-driven: a profile appears the moment your app fires an identify or track call, so never-messaged invalids from your SDK, an import from a previous ESP, or a signup typo look perfectly mailable until an event triggers their debut message - exactly when a mailbox provider forms its first impression of your domain. Qualisend closes that gap: export your audience, verify every address, and suppress the dead ones before they ever enter a Canvas. Here's the workflow that works today, plus the API and no-code options.
Connect Braze and clean it in place
Connect Braze with an API key and Qualisend verifies the lists you already have - right inside Braze, no export. Dead and risky addresses are suppressed or archived for you, every new subscriber is checked in real time, and you can re-verify on a schedule so the list never drifts back to dirty.
Prefer to work by hand, or verify at signup through your own stack? The CSV export → verify → reimport loop below and the REST API are fully supported too.
Connect BrazeWhat Braze cleans for you
Braze's native hygiene runs on two things: the global email subscription state and the bounce list. Every profile carries an email_subscribe state - opted_in, subscribed, or unsubscribed - and Braze won't send marketing email to an unsubscribed profile. When someone unsubscribes through your footer link or a list-unsubscribe header, Braze sets their global email subscription state to unsubscribed automatically. Separately, when an address hard-bounces, Braze marks it invalid, adds it to your bounce list, and stops attempting delivery - note that a hard bounce does not flip the subscription state, it simply flags the address as undeliverable so it's skipped on future sends. Spam complaints are treated the same way. For addresses Braze has actually messaged, that's reliable, automatic hygiene.
What it can't catch
The catch is that every one of those mechanisms is reactive - it needs a send and a failure to fire. Braze makes the blind spot sharper because it's event-driven: a profile is created the instant your app fires an identify or track call, so addresses from your SDK, an import from a previous ESP, or a signup typo (jane@gmial.com) have never bounced because they've never been messaged. Disposable addresses, role addresses (info@, support@), catch-all domains, and mailboxes that have decayed since capture all sit at email_subscribe = subscribed, fully mailable, until an event finally triggers their first message. Worse, because Braze re-enters people into Canvases and campaigns every time an event matches, a dead address doesn't fail once and vanish - it gets mailed again and again, compounding the bounce signal. An imported audience is the sharpest case: it arrives with its bounce history stripped, so addresses that were already failing on your old platform look brand new to Braze.
Why a clean Braze list matters
Braze doesn't bill by the contact - it prices on monthly active users, data points, and message volume - so unlike a contact-count ESP, suppressing a dead address won't shrink a per-contact invoice, and we won't pretend it will. The payoff here is deliverability and wasted sends, not a smaller line item. Every never-messaged invalid you leave mailable is a send spent delivering straight into a hard bounce, and Braze's event-driven re-entry means that waste repeats on every matching trigger rather than happening once. More importantly, each of those bounces is exactly the signal Gmail and Yahoo's 2024 bulk-sender rules - and your own deliverability monitoring - judge you on: cross their bounce-rate threshold and inbox placement drops for every subscriber, including the ones you earned honestly. At enterprise sending volume that reputation hit costs far more than the wasted sends themselves. Cleaning before the send keeps the message volume and the reputation intact - and because Braze doesn't charge data points for a subscription-status change, suppressing the failures costs you nothing on the bill either.
Prefer CSV or the API? Here's the manual path
Braze is an API/SDK and data-pipeline driven platform, so the reliable path is: export your audience with the dashboard CSV export or the /users/export/segment API, verify it in Qualisend, then suppress the failures by setting their email subscription state to unsubscribed via a CSV re-import or the /email/status API.
Export your audience from Braze
Open the segment you want to clean and use the User Data dropdown to run a CSV Export Email Addresses - it returns one row per user in the segment who has an email. Braze builds the file in the background and emails a download link to the dashboard user who requested it, so you'll need the Export user data permission, and dashboard exports can fail once a segment is estimated above roughly 500,000 users. For larger audiences or an automated pipeline, use the /users/export/segment API instead - it's asynchronous and built for bigger pulls, returning newline-separated JSON user objects to a generated URL or your S3 bucket.
Verify the file in Qualisend
Upload the CSV to Qualisend bulk cleaning - up to 1,000,000 addresses per job, duplicates charged once - or paste addresses directly. The free plan's 100 one-time credits, which never expire, cover a first sample. If you exported JSON from the API, pull the email field into a CSV column first.
Read the results
Every address returns deliverable, risky, undeliverable, or unknown with a reason code, a 0-100 score, and sub-flags (catch-all, disposable, role, full mailbox), plus the MX provider and probe detail as evidence. Download the cleaned CSV.
Suppress the undeliverables in Braze
Filter the results to undeliverable. The no-code path is a CSV import: keep the email column, add an email_subscribe column set to unsubscribed, and re-import - Braze sets those profiles' global email subscription state to unsubscribed so they drop out of every campaign and Canvas (watch for trailing spaces and capitalization, which Braze rejects as invalid). To automate it, POST the same addresses to the /email/status endpoint in batches of up to 50 with subscription_state unsubscribed (email.status permission). Neither the CSV column nor the /email/status call incurs data-point charges, so suppression itself is free. Braze's bounce list only catches these after they fail a real send, so this does the reputation-saving work up front; reserve /users/delete for genuine junk, since deletion also erases the profile's event history.
Or automate it at signup
Prefer to keep junk out from the start? Verify at the point of capture with the Qualisend REST API (scoped keys, rate limits, webhooks), or wire a no-code flow through Zapier, Make, or n8n so an address is checked before your app's identify or track call ever writes it into a Braze profile - so typos and disposable addresses never become mailable users or reach a Canvas.
What Qualisend flags on every address
- Never-messaged invalid addresses that would hard-bounce the first time an event triggers a send
- Disposable / throwaway domains accepted at signup that were built to expire
- Role addresses (info@, support@) that skew the engagement data your Braze segments and Canvases branch on
- Catch-all domains, flagged so you can route them to a dedicated segment and throttle
- A 0-100 confidence score and machine-readable reason code for every address
The native Braze connector is live - connect it in Qualisend under Integrations and clean your list without a single CSV. New contacts are verified automatically, and you can re-verify on a schedule.
What to do with each result
Every address comes back with a verdict and sub-flags. Here's the action that keeps your Braze list clean without throwing away contacts you can still reach.
deliverableKeep messaging as normal.deliverable + role flagKeep for transactional and account mail; exclude from engagement-judged Canvases.risky + catch-all flagMove to a dedicated segment and throttle - the domain accepts everything at the door, so the mailbox behind it can't be confirmed.risky + disposable flagSet email_subscribe to unsubscribed - the inbox was built to expire.unknownKeep subscribed and re-verify next clean - usually greylisting or rate-limiting, not a verdict on the mailbox.undeliverableSet the global email subscription state to unsubscribed (CSV re-import or /email/status); don't wait for the bounce list to prove it.Related reading
Cleaning is half of deliverability - authenticate your Braze sending domain too.
Verify at the point of capture so junk never becomes a mailable Braze profile.
Spot-check a sample of your Braze audience before a full bulk clean.
Why every repeated hard bounce on an event trigger compounds into a deliverability problem.
What a wave of hard bounces does to inbox placement across your whole audience.
The 2024 bounce and complaint thresholds your Braze sends are judged against.
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