What This Feature Does
Threat Check is a powerful list hygiene tool that scans your contacts for potential risks like spam traps, invalid addresses, and "honey pots." Using this feature helps protect your sender reputation and ensures your emails land in the inbox rather than the spam folder.
Why Use Threat Check?
Over time, email lists decay. Sending to "bad" addresses tells Inbox Service Providers (like Gmail or Outlook) that you aren't practicing good list hygiene, which can quickly lead to your campaigns being blocked.
You should use Threat Check if:
You haven't cleaned your list in over 6 months.
You are seeing a sudden spike in bounce rates or a drop in open rates.
You want to verify a new batch of imported contacts before sending your first campaign to them.
Understanding Threat Check Categories
When Threat Check scans your list, it categorizes your contacts based on their risk profile. Understanding these definitions will help you decide who to keep and who to suppress.
Clean: Contacts that have passed all validation checks and are completely safe to send to.
Reputation: Contacts that may harm your sender reputation if emailed (e.g., known complainers or spam traps).
Fraud: Contacts identified as fraudulent or associated with fraud-related activity.
Delivery: Contacts with existing delivery issues that may cause immediate bounces or routing problems.
Conversion: Contacts that may have conversion-related concerns or issues (e.g., bots that click but never convert).
Beta: Contacts flagged during beta testing phases.
Step 1: Enable the Threat Check Add-on
Before you can validate your list, you must enable the tool within your settings.
Click on your Profile Icon in the top navigation bar.
Select Settings from the drop-down menu.
In the left-hand menu, click on Add-ons.
Locate Threat Checks from the list and select it to open the configuration page.
Enable the add-on.
Note on Pricing: The Threat Check add-on is $10 (which includes your first 1,000 validations). Any additional validations are billed at $0.005 per contact.
Step 2: Validating Your Contacts
Once the add-on is enabled, you have two ways to validate your contacts: scanning your entire database or scanning a specific segment.
Option A: Validate Your Entire Database
Navigate to the Analytics tab within the Threat Checks section.
Under Contact Overview, click the Validate Now button.
A modal will appear confirming the action. (If you change your mind, click Cancel to close the window without starting the scan).
Click confirm to proceed with the global validation.
Option B: Clean a Specific List or Tag or Segment
If you recently imported a new batch of leads and only want to scan that specific group to save on validation credits:
Navigate to your Lists or Tags page via the main navigation bar.
Locate the specific list or tag you want to clean.
Click the three dots icon located on the right side of the table row.
Select the Threat Check option from the drop-down menu.
Confirm the action in the pop-up modal.
Step 3: Monitoring Progress
Validation can take some time depending on the size of your list. You do not need to stay on the page while it works.
Check Notifications: Click the Bell Icon in the navigation bar to see the "Validation Completion" message once the scan finishes.
View Results: Return to Settings > Add-ons > Threat Checks > Analytics. You will see the total number of validated contacts highlighted and broken down by category.
Step 4: Excluding Risky Contacts from Campaigns
When the addon is enabled, SendX automatically organizes your contacts so you can easily protect your deliverability.
SendX creates ready-to-use Segments for every type of contact flagged during the scan. These segments will appear in your account as:
Threat Check - Clean
Threat Check - Reputation
Threat Check - Fraud
Threat Check - Delivery
Threat Check - Conversion
Threat Check - Beta
How to use these segments:
When creating a new email campaign, navigate to the audience selection step. Use the Exclude criteria to select segments like Threat Check - Fraud and Threat Check - Reputation. This guarantees your campaign will only deploy to safe, healthy addresses, instantly protecting your sender reputation.
Important Notes & Limitations
No Double-Billing: You cannot validate the same contact twice. Once a contact is validated, they are marked as such in the system, ensuring you are only charged once per unique email address.
"No Contacts to Validate" Warning: If you see this button deactivated, it means your entire database has already been checked and no new contacts have been added since your last scan.
Common Questions (FAQ)
Does Threat Check automatically delete my contacts? No. Threat Check only identifies and segments them based on their risk level. You retain full control and can choose to exclude them from campaigns, unsubscribe them, or delete them manually based on their status.
How often should I run a Threat Check? It is a best practice to run a check whenever you import a large new list, acquire leads from a new source, or if you haven't sent a campaign to your existing audience in more than 90 days.