Keep your Keap contacts clean, deliverable, and under your contact limit
Keap automatically disables an address the moment it hard-bounces, permanently honors every opt-out, and gates every broadcast behind a Marketable email status - so it reacts well to an address it has already mailed. What it can't do is judge an address it has never sent to, and because contact count is the main lever on a Keap bill, those never-mailed invalids from imports, forms, and typos are both a deliverability risk and a line on your invoice. Qualisend closes that gap: connect Keap to verify your contacts (or verify an export), then opt out or delete the dead ones before your next broadcast. The CSV loop, the API and no-code options below work too.
Connect Keap directly, no CSV needed
All you need is an API key
Paste a Keap Personal Access Token or Service Account Key. Create one in Keap under Settings → API / integrations.
- Clean all your Keap contacts
- Results saved in a custom field on each contact
- New contacts checked in real time via webhook
- Auto-clean every 7, 14 or 30 days
Prefer CSV or the API? Both work too, see below.
What Keap cleans for you
Keap's native hygiene runs on a per-address email status. A hard bounce is treated as permanently undeliverable and the address is automatically disabled - Keap won't send it another automated email, and you can't reverse that by editing the status; the fix is a fresh email on a new contact record. Opt-outs, whether a contact clicks unsubscribe or you set them manually through Manage Email Status, permanently stop marketing and can't be reversed on your end. Sustained disengagement moves an address down a two-step ladder Keap re-checks every week: after about four months with no opens or clicks a Marketable address becomes Unengaged Marketable (still mailable), and after about six months it drops to Unengaged Non-Marketable, which can no longer be sent broadcasts or automations. And only a Marketable address receives broadcasts and automation emails in the first place - everything else can still get individual emails, appointment reminders, and invoices, but not campaigns. For addresses Keap has actually mailed, that's reliable, automatic hygiene. The catch is that stopping mail isn't removal: an opted-out, bounced, or non-marketable contact still sits in your account and still counts toward the contact total your plan is billed on.
What it can't catch
Every one of those mechanisms is reactive - it needs a send and a bounce (or a complaint) to fire. Never-mailed invalids from imports and signup forms, disposable addresses, role addresses, and mailboxes that have quietly decayed have never bounced because Keap has never sent to them, so they look healthy until your first broadcast proves otherwise - which is exactly when a mailbox provider forms its first impression of your domain. An imported list is the sharpest case: it arrives with its bounce history stripped, so an address that was already failing on your old platform looks brand new in Keap. There's a Keap-specific twist, too: contacts created through the REST API and many integrations land as Non-Marketable by default, and imports where you don't confirm permission do the same - so marketability tells you who you're allowed to broadcast to, never whether the address behind it is real. A permissioned, Marketable contact can still be a typo that hard-bounces on send one.
Why a clean Keap list matters
On Keap the stakes are double, because contact count is the main lever on your bill - the Pro plan includes 1,500 contacts and Max includes 2,500, and above that you buy additional contacts in tiered blocks (up through 5,000, 10,000, 25,000 and beyond), so your invoice steps up as the list grows. Crucially, every contact counts toward that total regardless of email status: opting a contact out or letting Keap auto-disable a hard bounce stops the mail but doesn't free the slot, so the dead address keeps occupying a place on your count. Keap's own guidance is blunt - to get back under your limit you either raise it or delete contacts, and only deleting actually reduces the count. One catch worth knowing: Keap won't drop the extra charge on its own when your numbers fall, so after you delete you also lower your plan's contact limit under Edit Subscription to turn that headroom into a smaller bill at your next billing cycle. Verified-undeliverable junk is the safest thing to pull. Meanwhile the deliverability cost compounds: a list full of never-mailed invalids turns your next broadcast into a wave of hard bounces that Keap itself flags as reputation-damaging, and that Gmail and Yahoo's 2024 sender rules police directly through bounce and complaint rates. Cleaning before a send does both jobs at once - it clears the room to shrink the count your plan is billed on, and it protects the inbox placement of the broadcasts that actually convert.
Prefer CSV or the API? Here's the manual path
The native connector is the fastest route, but the CSV loop works on any Keap plan: export from Keap, verify in Qualisend, and act on the results.
Export your contacts from Keap
Go to Contacts > People, filter or build a saved search (or select a tag) to target the list you want to clean, then check Select All and click Export at the bottom of the page. Choose the fields to include - keep the email column, and the email status field too if you want Keap's current verdict sitting next to ours. Exports of 1,000 contacts or fewer download straight to CSV; for 1,001 or more, Keap emails you a link to the finished file.
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 a sample into the free checker first. The free plan's 100 one-time credits, which never expire, cover an initial spot-check.
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.
Opt out or delete the undeliverables in Keap
Keap has no "import to a suppression list" step, so you act on the contacts directly. Filter your results to undeliverable, match those addresses in Keap, and either opt them out - through Manage Email Status on a single record, or a mass opt-out via the Actions menu's Update Opt-in/Opt-out Status on a group - or delete them. Opting out permanently stops all marketing and keeps the record, but the contact still counts toward your contact total; deleting is what removes it from that count. To see the deletion on your invoice you also lower your plan's contact limit under Edit Subscription, since Keap won't drop the additional-contact charge automatically. Deletion is permanent and takes the contact's whole history - orders, interactions, campaign activity - with it, and can only be undone by a Keap data restore, so reserve it for verified-dead junk with no history worth keeping. Keep the cleaned CSV as the record that stops a future import from silently re-adding them.
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 a new Keap contact is checked before it's ever created - so typos and disposable addresses never reach a broadcast or your contact count. It's especially worth doing on Keap, where contacts pushed in through the API or an integration land Non-Marketable by default: verifying at capture lets you confirm the address is real while you handle permission separately.
What Qualisend flags on every address
- Never-mailed invalid addresses that would hard-bounce on your next broadcast - and get auto-disabled by Keap only after the damage is done
- Disposable / throwaway domains built to expire
- Role addresses (info@, support@) that skew engagement and drag contacts toward Keap's Unengaged Non-Marketable status
- Catch-all domains, flagged so you can tag them into a segment and throttle your sends
- A 0-100 confidence score and machine-readable reason code for every address
The native Keap connector is live. Connect it in Qualisend under Integrations and work with your Keap list directly, no CSV needed.
What to do with each result
Every address comes back with a verdict and sub-flags. Here's the action that keeps your Keap list clean without throwing away contacts you can still reach.
deliverableKeep as a Marketable contact and send as normal.deliverable + role flagKeep for individual emails, invoices, and reminders; exclude from broadcasts and engagement-judged automations.risky + catch-all flagTag into a dedicated segment and throttle - the domain accepts everything at the door, so the mailbox behind it can't be confirmed.risky + disposable flagOpt out or delete - the inbox was built to expire.unknownKeep active and re-verify next clean - usually greylisting or rate-limiting, not a verdict on the mailbox.undeliverableOpt out to stop the send now, and delete to take it off your contact count; don't wait for the hard bounce to auto-disable it.Related reading
Verify at capture so junk never becomes a billable Keap contact.
Paste a sample and see the shape of your list before you commit a credit.
How fast a dirty list compounds into a deliverability problem.
What a wave of hard bounces does to your standing with mailbox providers.
The 2024 bounce and complaint thresholds your Keap broadcasts are judged on.
The platform-agnostic playbook behind the workflow above.
Keap verification FAQ
Clean your Keap list in minutes
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