Braze Segment for Users with No Email Opens in 90 Days

Why your Braze segments for inactive users may be incomplete

You’re segmenting users who haven’t opened an email in 90 days. You’re confident it’s your most engaged audience. But what if some of those “inactive” users never had a real inbox to begin with?

Open rates don’t lie — but they’re only as accurate as the email addresses behind them. A segment built solely on open history can include invalid, role-based, or disposable emails that never belonged to real people. These false inactives inflate your churn metrics and drain your campaign budget on messages that never land.

Without verifying email addresses before or after segmentation, you can’t tell if someone is truly inactive or just never existed in the first place. That gap leaves your engagement data untrustworthy — and your messaging inefficient.

Key takeaways

• Segmenting users by email open history alone includes invalid, role, and disposable emails that mimic inactivity.
• Unverified email addresses distort engagement metrics and waste send capacity on non-reachables.
• Validating email addresses before or after segmentation is necessary to distinguish real inactivity from invalid or non-existent addresses.

How to build a truly accurate Braze segment for users with no email opens in 90 days

You can build a precise Braze segment of users with no email opens in 90 days by first exporting your list with email addresses and last open timestamps, then cleaning it with bulk email verification to remove invalid, disposable, catch-all, and role-based addresses. Only after verification should you apply the 90-day open filter. This removes fake or undeliverable emails, ensuring your segment includes only real users who haven’t engaged — making reactivation campaigns more effective and saving send volume and reputation.

Start with a clean export

Export your user list from Braze, including every email address and the timestamp of the last email open. This is your starting point — but raw data from a CRM or platform often includes stale, mistyped, or outdated addresses.

Use the bulk email list cleaning tool to verify each address in your export. This step is critical: without it, you’re filtering on dead weight.

Verify before you filter

1. Run your list through a verified email-verification service. A service like Email List Validation checks SMTP connectivity, domains, and formats in real time, flagging invalid, catch-all, disposable, and role-based addresses (like admin@ or sales@).
2. Filter out non-deliverable types. Disposables (like mailinator.com) and role addresses aren’t suitable for outreach. Catch-all domains accept any email, meaning an address might be valid but not tied to a real person — often resulting in spam traps or bouncebacks.
3. Reapply the 90-day open filter only to verified addresses. Now that you’ve stripped out the unusable, you can confidently segment only real users who haven’t opened in 90 days. This avoids wasted sends and protects your sender reputation.

According to RFC 6854, the use of role-based email addresses in marketing campaigns is discouraged due to high bounce and spamtrap risk. A clean list reduces the likelihood of being flagged by mailbox providers.

Many brands assume “no opens” means “inactive.” But without filtering out non-deliverable emails first, you may be chasing ghosts. Only verified, deliverable addresses should inform engagement segments.

Once cleaned, your segment is accurate. And that means every email you send has a real chance to be seen — not lost to a dead address or a catch-all.

What each email verification verdict means for your Braze segment

Every email verification verdict tells you how to treat a contact in your Braze segment of users with no email opens in 90 days. Valid? Keep them. Invalid? Remove. Catch-all, risky, or disposable? Exclude to protect deliverability and sender reputation. These decisions directly affect inbox placement and long-term campaign performance.

How each verdict should guide your Braze actions

Verdicts like catch-all and risky are common in low-quality lists and can silently degrade sender reputation over time. Email List Validation identifies these with 98.9% accuracy, helping you maintain high inbox placement across platforms like Braze.

How email verification improves Braze segmentation accuracy

You can’t accurately segment users who haven’t opened an email in 90 days if your list includes invalid or undeliverable addresses. These false inactives inflate your inactive user count, distort engagement metrics, and waste campaigns on addresses that never receive messages. Email verification cleans your list before segmentation, ensuring only active, functioning inboxes are included.

Eliminating false inactivity signals

Without verification, a single bounced address—like a typo-ridden or non-existent email—could be tagged as “inactive” simply because it never opened a message. That’s not engagement data—it’s noise. You might mistakenly treat a dead address as a dormant user, skewing retention reports and leading to poor decisions.

Let’s be clear: a user who never opens an email might still be valuable, but only if they’re real and reachable. If their address is invalid, no amount of segmentation will help. Verification removes that uncertainty upfront. It prevents you from misclassifying invalid addresses as inactive users, which keeps your data clean and your metrics honest.

Reducing false positives and negatives

False positives happen when an invalid or disposable email gets counted as inactive. False negatives occur when a real user gets excluded because their address was never validated. Both hurt your segmentation. Verification reduces both—ensuring you're only segmenting real people with valid, active inboxes.

For example, a catch-all domain might accept any email but never deliver it. A real user might be assigned a temporary address that gets discarded after 30 days. If you don’t verify, both become part of your “no open in 90 days” list—misrepresenting your actual audience. Verification filters these out.

According to Return Path, up to 20% of email lists contain invalid addresses. Even a small percentage can distort segmentation. Regular verification helps maintain list hygiene, which directly supports accurate Braze segments.

When you verify your list—especially before running a 90-day inactive campaign—you're not just cleaning data; you're ensuring every user in that segment has a real, working inbox. That means better targeting, higher deliverability, and more accurate performance reporting.

Use our bulk verification to clean your entire database, or integrate our API to verify addresses at signup. Either way, you’re building a foundation for precise, reliable segmentation in Braze. Keep your audiences real, your data honest, and your campaigns focused.

Why catch-all and role addresses distort inactive user reports

You’re segmenting users who haven’t opened an email in 90 days, but some of those "inactive" users are actually catch-all domains or role addresses—systems that accept all mail without verifying the individual. These don't open emails, not because they’re inactive, but because they’re not real people. Including them inflates your inactivity rate and leads you to waste time and budget on re-engagement campaigns for accounts that can't engage.

Catch-all domains mask delivery failures

Catch-all domains route every email to a mailbox, regardless of whether the address exists. This means your delivery confirmation system sees "delivered" even when the user never receives it, leading the system to wrongly assume the user is inactive when they may never have been reached at all. RFC 5321 defines how SMTP handles mail routing, and catch-alls violate the principle of targeted delivery by design.

Role addresses aren’t users

Addresses like support@ or info@ aren’t assigned to individuals. They’re shared inboxes, often monitored by teams or bots. These never open campaigns, not because users are dormant, but because they’re not users at all. If you include them in an inactivity segment, you’re not measuring engagement — you’re measuring noise. The resulting segment won’t respond, no matter how personalized your message.

Let’s look at what happens at scale: a list with 10,000 users might include 500 catch-all or role emails. If your segmentation logic flags all non-openers, you now have 500 false positives in your “inactive” segment. That’s 5% of your list wrongly labeled as disengaged, skewing your metrics, distorting send performance, and increasing churn risk.

It's not just about accuracy—it's about cost. Sending re-engagement campaigns to non-humans wastes credits, degrades sender reputation, and can hurt your domain’s deliverability. Platforms like Braze track engagement to adjust sender reputation, but if your list includes systems that can’t open emails, the system sees your domain as less trustworthy.

Use email verification to filter out catch-all domains and role addresses before segmentation. Tools like Email List Validation check domain behavior, address patterns, and delivery signals in real time. You’ll catch role addresses (like sales@ or team@) and catch-alls before they taint your data.

Even better, use the real-time API to validate emails at signup or during onboarding. This prevents bad addresses from entering your system in the first place.

When you segment by inactivity, you want real users, not systems. Clean your list first—then trust your reports.

The risk of sending to disposable or invalid emails in Braze campaigns

You’re wasting send capacity and risking your sender reputation by including disposable or invalid emails in your Braze segments. These addresses rarely open, often bounce, and can trigger spam filters — all while skewing your engagement metrics and inflating your list size artificially. You’re not reaching real users; you’re burning reputation.

Disposable emails don’t open — they just take up space

Addresses from services like Mailinator or TempMail are commonly used for fake sign-ups. They’re not owned by real people and will never open your emails. Yet they still show up in Braze as "active" if you include them in a segment for "no opens in 90 days." That’s not an inactive user — it’s a non-user.

Let’s say you’re sending a welcome series or re-engagement campaign. Every time you target someone with a disposable address, you’re sending to someone who has no interest — and no intention to engage. This inflates your open rates with zero value, distorting your analytics and making it harder to spot real patterns in your audience.

Invalid emails hurt deliverability — even if they’re not disposable

But even valid-looking addresses may be invalid. Typoed emails, old accounts, or closed domains still exist in your list. When you send to them, you get hard bounces. That’s a red flag to inbox providers, and it weighs on your sender reputation.

According to Return Path, a consistently high bounce rate — even just 0.5% — can lead to filtering or delivery delays. And if you’re sending thousands of messages per day, a few thousand invalid addresses can push you over that threshold. This isn’t theoretical — it’s how domains get blacklisted.

Valid but inactive doesn’t mean you should still send

Many users who haven’t opened in 90 days are still valid — but that doesn’t mean they should get your emails. Re-engagement campaigns work best when you target people who are at least potentially open to communication.

Forcing messages on users who’ve ignored you for months is a signal to email providers that your content lacks relevance. This can hurt your inbox placement over time, even if the recipient is valid. The risk is not just in sending to fake accounts — it’s also in sending to real ones who’ve disengaged.

That’s why cleaning your list before segmenting in Braze is critical. You don’t just reduce bounces — you protect your sender reputation and improve true deliverability. Use a tool like bulk email list validation to identify and remove invalid, disposable, and risky addresses before sending. It's not just about cleaning a list — it’s about protecting your ability to reach real people.

A real-time API alternative for dynamic cleansing in Braze workflows

You can stop adding dead weight to your Braze audience by validating emails the moment they’re entered—using the Email List Validation API to check validity, catch-all status, and risk signals before they ever hit Braze. That way, you never onboard users who aren’t real or won’t engage, reducing wasted sends and protecting your sender reputation.

Integrate verification into your onboarding or sync workflows

1. Connect the Email List Validation API to your sign-up or data sync endpoint. Every time a new email is submitted, send it to the API immediately. The response—valid, invalid, catch-all, or risky—determines whether the user proceeds.
2. Reject or flag invalid or high-risk addresses in real time. Do not let emails with malformed syntax, known disposable domains, or role-based addresses (like admin@ or sales@) reach Braze. These often fail to deliver and can hurt deliverability over time.
3. Use the API to block catch-all domains before they enter your database. A catch-all accepts any email address, which means it’s often used to mask spam traps or fake accounts. These cause bounces and damage your sender reputation over time.
4. Prevent greylisting and temporary failures from skewing your engagement metrics. Emails trapped in temporary rejection chains may appear “inactive” when they're just delayed. The API surface detects these early, avoiding false assumptions about user behavior.
5. Update your Braze segments dynamically by integrating verification results into your workflow. Use the API's response to automatically exclude or flag users who are not valid—no manual cleansing needed after the fact.

Let’s be clear: waiting to clean your audience after the fact is costly. According to a 2023 report by Return Path, invalid addresses can lead to up to 8% of emails being rejected outright, with sender reputation damage compounding over time.

Why real-time cleansing prevents long-term damage

When users aren’t real—whether due to typos, fake data, or disposable domains—they can’t open emails. But they still show up in Braze as “inactive.” The result? Your “no opens in 90 days” segment fills with dead accounts, making segmentation less accurate, campaigns less effective, and your inbox placement more at risk.

API-driven validation stops that cycle before it starts. You’re not cleaning up after bad data—you never let it in. This is how you keep your data pure, your delivery rates high, and your messaging effective.

Learn how to apply real-time verification at scale: Email List Validation API.

How to avoid over-segmenting and wasting send volume

Sending to inactive users you haven’t verified doesn’t just waste sends—it can hurt inbox placement. High volumes to invalid or low-engagement addresses trigger spam filters and degrade sender reputation. Instead, verify email addresses first. That way, you send re-engagement campaigns only to valid, active users. You preserve deliverability, avoid list fatigue, and keep your reputation intact across every send.

Volume thresholds and spam detection

Even when you’re targeting “inactive” users, sending to thousands of unverified addresses can trigger volume-based spam algorithms. ISPs often flag high-volume sends from a single source, especially if engagement is low or bounces are high. That’s how your brand gets flagged—even if your content is relevant.

Spamhaus and MxToolbox both document how sender reputation is influenced by consistent volume and engagement patterns. Sending only to verified users lets you stay under the radar of automated scoring systems.

Verifying before outreach preserves sender reputation

Let’s be clear: you’re not saving send volume by including bad addresses. You’re risking your reputation. Every bounce, every hard failure, every non-engagement event counts toward your sender score. The more you send to invalid or inactive addresses, the worse your long-term deliverability becomes.

Use email verification to filter out invalid, catch-all, or disposable domains before segmenting for re-engagement. This turns a broadcast to a targeted campaign. You’re not just reducing waste—you’re increasing the odds every email lands in the inbox. It’s a quiet upgrade, but one that compounds over time.

Try our bulk email list cleaning to remove dead addresses in your Braze segment. Or use our real-time API to verify addresses as they enter your CRM. Either way, you’re sending to users you can actually reach.

How Email List Validation integrates with Braze and other platforms

You can connect Email List Validation to Braze directly via native integration or through standard export/import workflows, and use it to verify lists from Mailchimp, HubSpot, Klaviyo, SendGrid, and other major ESPs in bulk. The results help you segment inactive users—like those who haven’t opened an email in 90 days—then clean them out before sending, improving deliverability and sender reputation. With real-time feedback and AI guidance, you act faster and with higher confidence.

Seamless workflow integration

• Use the native Braze integration to sync verification data directly into your campaign workflow without manual exports.
• Alternatively, export your user list from Braze (or your ESP), run bulk validation via our bulk verification tool, then re-import only the valid addresses.
• Supports all major ESPs: Mailchimp, HubSpot, Klaviyo, SendGrid, and more—no need to reinvent the wheel.
• Verify lists at scale: process 10,000+ addresses in under 10 minutes with our real-time API for programmatic use and automation.

Smart cleaning with AI-guided action

• After verification, you’ll see clear results: valid, invalid, catch-all, or risky—each with a real-world meaning (e.g., ‘catch-all’ means the domain accepts any email, but the address may not exist).
• Our in-app AI assistant analyzes your list and suggests next steps: “Remove 12% invalid addresses to reduce bounce rate,” or “Flag users with no opens in 90 days and re-engage or remove.”
• If you’re targeting inactive users, use the results to build a segment: users with status “valid” but no opens in 90 days—perfect for re-engagement campaigns.
• Check inbox placement with inbox placement testing to confirm your clean list lands in inboxes, not spam folders.
• For better sender reputation, avoid greylisting and role accounts. We flag those during validation—common sources of delay or failure.
• SMTP, MX, and DNS checks are run in real time to assess delivery potential—no guesswork.

“A clean list is a reliable list.”—Email deliverability best practices from RFC 5321, which defines SMTP behavior and message routing.

What you gain by cleaning your Braze list with verified data

You gain clearer engagement signals, higher inbox delivery, and fewer wasted sends by removing invalid, inactive, or fake emails from your Braze segments. With verified data, your "no opens in 90 days" segment reflects real disengagement, not noise. This means better reporting, less spam risk, and smarter re-engagement campaigns.

Accurate engagement metrics start with clean data

Without verification, your inactive segment includes emails that never existed, are auto-deleted, or belong to role accounts. That inflates inactivity counts and distorts your understanding of user behavior. Let’s be clear: a Return Path study shows that unverified lists can contain up to 20% invalid addresses—enough to skew your entire engagement model.

When you clean your list with real-time validation, your “no emails opened in 90 days” segment becomes measurable. You’re not just filtering by inactivity—you’re filtering by actual existence and validity. That trust in data lets you act on signals, not assumptions.

Send performance improves with every clean email

Every invalid email you remove reduces the risk of bounces, which hurt sender reputation over time. High bounce rates trigger filters from mailbox providers like Gmail and Outlook. You want to avoid the greylisting that follows, where messages are delayed or rejected while systems verify intent.

Verified lists improve inbox placement. Studies show that sending to lists with less than 0.5% invalid email rates results in stable delivery rates over time. That’s not luck— it’s due diligence. Cleaning your Braze list with tools like bulk verification or the real-time API keeps your sender reputation intact.

And yes, you’ll send fewer messages—but only to real people. That’s not waste. It’s precision. When you target only verified, active users, your re-engagement campaigns have a better chance of success. Even a 3% open rate becomes more valuable when it comes from someone who actually received your message.

Conclusion: Segment with confidence, not assumptions

Segmenting users who haven’t opened an email in 90 days is only effective if those users are real people with active inboxes. Without verification, your segment may include invalid, disposable, or role-based addresses that skew your results.

Email List Validation ensures every address in your Braze segment has a functioning inbox and belongs to an actual individual. This prevents wasted sends, protects sender reputation, and improves overall engagement metrics.

With 98.9% accuracy, you can trust your segments are built on real data—not assumptions. Clean lists mean better campaigns, higher inbox placement, and stronger long-term deliverability.

Sources

• Segmented email campaigns earn 14.31% higher open rates and 100.95% higher click rates than non-segmented campaigns. — Mailchimp (2025)
• The average email open rate across all industries is 39.64%, with a 3.25% click-through rate and an 8.62% click-to-open rate. — GetResponse Email Marketing Benchmarks (2024)

Keep reading

• List validation integrations with ESPs and CRMs (complete guide)
• How to Verify HubSpot Contact Emails Before a Campaign
• Magento Newsletter Subscribers List Full of Bots? How to Clean It
• Klaviyo Welcome Series Flow Template for Shopify 2026
• Klaviyo Engaged Segment Not Updating or Showing Wrong Count

Ready to put this into practice? Email List Validation verifies emails with 98.9% accuracy — start with 100 free verifications.

Frequently asked questions

What is a Braze segment for users with no email opens in 90 days?

It’s a user group in Braze defined by lack of open activity over the past 90 days, used to target re-engagement campaigns.

Why should I verify emails before creating an inactive segment?

To ensure only real, deliverable addresses are included — avoiding false inactives caused by invalid, disposable, or role emails.

What types of emails should I remove from inactive segments?

Invalid, disposable, catch-all, and role-based emails — these often appear inactive but are not real end users.

How does email verification improve Braze campaign performance?

By cleaning lists of non-deliverable addresses, it reduces bounces, protects sender reputation, and improves inbox placement.

Can I use Email List Validation with Braze directly?

Yes — it integrates with Braze via export/import or can be used with APIs to verify addresses before syncing to Braze.

What is the accuracy of Email List Validation?

It has a 98.9% verification accuracy rate, meaning nearly every validated email is deliverable and belongs to a real user.

Do purchased credits expire with Email List Validation?

No — purchased credits never expire, allowing you to verify lists at scale without time pressure.

How many free verifications do I get with Email List Validation?

You receive 100 free verifications to start — no credit card required — before purchasing additional credits.

What’s the difference between catch-all and invalid email addresses?

A catch-all accepts all emails but cannot confirm delivery. An invalid address does not exist or fails syntax checks.

How often should I verify my Braze email list?

At least quarterly, or after major campaigns — and always before re-engagement efforts to ensure deliverability.

Can role emails open emails in Braze?

Some may, but they’re not reliable indicators of engagement. Role addresses often represent shared inboxes not monitored by individuals.

Is it safe to send to users with zero opens in 90 days?

Only if they’re verified and valid. Sending to invalid or disposable addresses harms reputation — focus on real users only.