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6.7. Mailchimp status types
Mailchimp has 4 main Status types. These being:
1. Subscribed
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These are active contacts who have explicitly opted in to receive your marketing emails.
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They count toward your audience limit and monthly plan cost.
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You can freely send campaigns to them.
2. Unsubscribed
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These contacts were previously subscribed, but they opted out (clicked "unsubscribe").
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You cannot email them marketing campaigns, but you still keep their data for reporting and targeting (e.g., creating lookalike segments, excluding them, etc.).
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They do not count toward your monthly send limit, but they do count toward your audience size for billing.
3. Archived
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Archiving is like "putting contacts away in storage."
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Archived contacts are removed from your active audience count (so they no longer count toward billing).
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You cannot send them campaigns unless you unarchive them.
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Their history (tags, engagement, etc.) is preserved in case you want to restore them later.
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Useful if you want to clean up your audience but don’t want to permanently delete contacts.
4. Cleaned
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These are email addresses that Mailchimp has marked as undeliverable (hard bounces or repeated soft bounces).
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They cannot be emailed at all because their address is invalid or rejected by the recipient’s server.
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They do not count toward billing.
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Kept in your audience list for record-keeping, so you don’t try to re-import them later.
Quick summary:
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Subscribed = Active, mailable.
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Unsubscribed = Opted out, kept for records, billable.
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Archived = Inactive, not billable, restorable.
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Cleaned = Invalid address, undeliverable, not billable.