A SaaS marketer posed a familiar question in r/Emailmarketing: after an eight-month silence, should a client remove the 45% of subscribers who have not opened an email in more than a year?

The instinct behind the question is right: do not resume regular sending to the entire database as if nothing happened. But “delete everyone who has not opened” is too crude a rule, too—especially for a SaaS business whose buyers may have long evaluation cycles, multiple stakeholders, or intermittent product needs.

The better framing is: move inactive contacts out of the regular sending lane, then earn back the right to mail them.

A dormant list is a sending-reputation problem

The danger is not simply that inactive subscribers make campaign reports look bad. After a long pause, recipients may not recognize the sender, ignore messages, or hit spam. Those outcomes can make it harder for future mail to reach the inboxes of people who do want it.

Mailbox providers have made this operational reality more explicit. Google’s sender guidelines require bulk senders—those sending more than 5,000 messages a day to personal Gmail accounts—to authenticate mail, support easy unsubscription, and keep spam rates reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%. Yahoo likewise says senders should mail a timely, relevant, active audience and keep spam complaints below 0.3%. [Google Sender Guidelines; Yahoo Sender Best Practices]

That does not mean a list with 45% non-openers is automatically poisonous. It does mean the client should not interpret raw list size as marketing value. A contact who cannot be safely and profitably mailed is not an asset in the same sense as an engaged subscriber.

Why “no opens for a year” should be a segment, not a deletion command

Open data is useful, but it is not a clean statement of human intent. Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection prevents senders from seeing whether a message was opened and downloads remote content in the background, which can distort open-based activity signals. [Apple Mail Privacy Protection]

For that reason, a one-year non-opener segment should be refined with other evidence:

  • No clicks, replies, website visits, product usage, trials, purchases, or sales activity.
  • No recent form fills, webinar registrations, support interactions, or preference-center updates.
  • No deliverability risk signals, such as repeated soft bounces or an address that is clearly invalid.
  • No reason to expect seasonal or infrequent engagement.

A dormant prospect who logged into the SaaS product last week is not inactive in any meaningful business sense, even if their email client did not record an open. Conversely, a contact with no email, website, or product signal for 12 months belongs outside the main newsletter cadence.

Mailchimp’s own guidance makes the useful distinction: the definition of inactivity should reflect a company’s sending frequency and product cycle. Seasonal businesses may reasonably use a year or longer, while fast-cycle marketers may use a much shorter window. It recommends segmentation and a few re-engagement attempts before archiving contacts that remain unresponsive. [Mailchimp, “Identify Inactive Subscribers”]

The recovery plan: suppress, warm, re-permission

For the SaaS client in the Reddit post, the practical answer is a controlled restart.

1. Fix the foundation before increasing volume. Confirm SPF, DKIM, and DMARC alignment; ensure one-click unsubscribe works; and verify the sending domain, From address, and preference center. For a high-volume sender, these are baseline requirements, not optional deliverability enhancements. [Google Sender Guidelines; Yahoo Sender Best Practices]

2. Build three audiences. Create an active segment from recent clickers, customers, trial users, product users, and recent site visitors. Create a middle segment of subscribers with some historical engagement but no recent activity. Put year-plus non-openers with no supporting activity into a dormant segment that is excluded from normal campaigns.

3. Restart with the strongest audience. Send the first regular campaigns to active subscribers only, at a steady and familiar cadence. Monitor bounces, complaints, clicks, conversions, and inbox placement—not just opens.

4. Run a small, explicit win-back campaign. The dormant group can receive one or two highly relevant messages, not a sudden return to the weekly newsletter. Lead with a concrete reason to care: a product update tied to their original use case, a useful benchmark, a new integration, or a choice to update preferences. Make the call to action unmistakable: “Still want these updates? Click to stay subscribed.”

5. Sunset the silent remainder. Anyone who neither engages nor reconfirms should remain suppressed or be archived according to the platform’s workflow and the company’s retention policy. Mailchimp notes that automated re-engagement flows can take a post-send action such as unsubscribing contacts who do not respond. [Mailchimp, “Re-Engage Inactive Subscribed Contacts”]

How to persuade the client

Do not sell this as “losing 45% of the list.” Sell it as protecting the revenue-producing portion of the audience while creating a measured test for the rest.

The dashboard should show two numbers: total permissioned contacts and mailable, engaged audience. Then report the win-back group separately: how many were mailed, reconfirmed, clicked, converted, unsubscribed, or stayed silent.

That turns a subjective argument about vanity metrics into a business decision. The goal is not the smallest possible list. It is a list that recognizes the sender, wants the message, and can reliably receive the next one.

The Reddit poster was right to be cautious. The adjustment is simple: don’t make a mass deletion the first move. Make segregation, evidence-based re-engagement, and suppression the default.