Verify emails for Mailchimp with Spaw

A Mailchimp audience is only as good as the addresses that enter it, and a high bounce rate on a campaign can get sending paused. Spaw does not connect to your Mailchimp account directly. Instead, a Zap or a Make scenario verifies each new subscriber and tags the record, and a bulk run cleans what is already there. Both keep the decision in Mailchimp, where segments and automations can use it.

Verify new subscribers

1. Create a secret API key on the API keys page of your Spaw dashboard.
2. In Zapier or Make, start with the Mailchimp trigger for a new subscriber in the audience you care about.
3. Add the verification step: a Webhooks by Zapier POST or a Make HTTP request to https://spaw.co/api/v1/email with the header Authorization: Bearer sk_live_… and this body, mapping the subscriber's address:

{
  "email": "[email protected]"
}

The Zapier page and the Make page show every field of the step. When the Spaw apps for those platforms are listed, the step becomes a Verify Email action with a saved connection.

4. Add the Mailchimp action that adds or updates a subscriber, match on the same email, and set a tag from the verdict: for example verified when data.deliverable is deliverable, risky when it is risky, and undeliverable otherwise. A merge field can hold the reason if you want it visible on the profile.
5. Test with [email protected], which answers a fixed result at no cost and never appears in your history.

Mailchimp double opt-in already keeps most typos out of an audience. Verification adds what confirmation cannot: it flags throwaway domains, role inboxes and catch-all domains before the first campaign, and it catches addresses that confirmed once and died later.

Clean an existing audience

Export the audience to CSV, run the email column through a bulk verification on the Spaw dashboard or the bulk endpoint, and import the result CSV back with the verdict column mapped to a merge field or used to build tags on import. The result keeps your original columns. Rows that answer undeliverable also land on your Spaw suppression list, so future bulk runs answer them for free.

Send bounces back to Spaw

Mailchimp cleans hard bounces from the audience on its own. Export those cleaned addresses now and then and post them to the suppression import endpoint as { "emails": [...] }, up to 10,000 per request. Every later batch or bulk run then answers them from the list at no cost, which keeps them from re-entering through another form.

What to do with the verdict

Segment on the tags. Send campaigns to verified, and to risky subscribers only after a look at the reason: catch_all domains accept every address and are often real business inboxes, role inboxes such as newsletter@ rarely open campaigns, and disposable domains are gone by the time you send. Do not send to undeliverable; archive or unsubscribe those, and when the response's data.did_you_mean is filled, an internal notification lets someone fix the record before it is lost. The bounce rate guide shows what these groups do to deliverability if they are left in.

Cost

Each new subscriber that answers deliverable or risky spends 1 credit; undeliverable answers and repeats within seven days are free. Zapier and Make bill their own tasks. A bulk run bills per processed row and verifies duplicates once, and suppression imports are free.