List hygiene plays a role in the email delivery race. Whether you are a software developer sending the letters about the updates and new software releases to your customers at a regular basis, or you run a web site and send weekly/monthly newsletters to your subscribers, or you simply have a list of email addresses, to which you intend sending regular messages, you should worry about the mailing list hygiene.

The average email address lifespan is approximately three years. Old, abandon email addresses are often used as "spamtrap" addresses. A spamtrap is an email address used by a filtering service to identify spam. A message sent to a spamtrap doesn't bounce. It's received by someone and considered spam, or sent straight into a blackhole (deleted), along with all the rest of your messages to that ISP's users. And furthermore, a lot of ISP mail servers have been known to block a sender's email domain for repeated sending messages to email addresses from a non-existing domain.

Writing about the mailing list hygiene, we should not forget about the unsubscribe requests. Ideally a nice composed email letter always provides the recipients with an option to unsubscribe either as a URL, or in some other way. People who do not want to receive your letters anymore can easily request to be removed from your list. So, you have no choice but delete their emails from your email list or database. People won't like much if you continue bombarding them with your newsletters they do not want to receive, will they? That's why maintaining only valid email addresses of people who are interested in receiving letters from you is not only high priority, it's mandatory. 

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