Yes, Mailchimp has free and paid versions with different subscription plans.

Mailchimp offers a 30-day free trial for new users to test its basic features and create marketing content.

When an email is marked as “cleaned” in Mailchimp, this means that either the last email sent to that address was hard-bounced or the soft bounce was repeated multiple times in a row.

A hard bounce occurs when an email message cannot be delivered to its intended address for permanent reasons. These reasons include things like incorrect or spoofed email addresses, unregistered email domains, or servers that refuse to accept emails due to security filters. In most cases, it makes sense to remove hard-bounced emails from your mailing list because having a high bounce rate on your emails can negatively impact your email reputation, and hard-bounced emails are unlikely to do anything more than bounce on future deliveries.

Soft bounces are emails that are not delivered due to temporary reasons. This could be something like an inbox that is full, a message that is too large, or a temporary delivery problem. Since soft bounce emails have a higher chance of temporary problems, you usually want to try to send them again. However, if these soft bounces keep happening, it’s a good idea to stop sending mail to that person. This is essentially what the “Cleanup” feature does for you – enforces best practices about how to handle bounces.

In general, you want to keep your bounce rate below 2% or you’ll start experiencing delivery problems and damage your email sender’s reputation. Cleaned addresses help you reach this goal.

So when Mailchimp marks an email as “cleared”, it indicates that these emails were removed from your list due to a single hard bounce or multiple soft bounces – they are actually unsubscribed contacts. These are the contacts that were cleaned up. This is a good thing because these are the emails you wanted to remove from your list anyway. Your domain’s email reputation is nothing to play with.

However, one thing to remember about purged contacts in Mailchimp is that misspellings are guaranteed to bounce hard. For example, if a contact enters their email as “mask@abcne.com” instead of “mask@abcme.com”, that email will likely bounce. However, you may prefer to fix these emails rather than remove them from your email marketing list.

And this issue relates to the larger issue of data cleanliness and data cleaning in Mailchimp, which is what you probably want “clean” to mean when you see contacts marked as “clean” in your Mailchimp account.

Mailchimp is a bulk emailing & contact management system, they are not a mailing house, so you need to have your own opt-in permission contact lists to upload into their platform.

With Mailchimp you can send the same newsletter to many people at the same time and see reports: how many people opened your email, how many clicked on some links, how many unsubscribed, etc.

Mailchimp’s pricing starts at $13 for the Essentials Plan, while their standard Plan is $20 and the Premium Plan is $350. There is also a free Mailchimp plan and a pay-as-you-go option.