What action options does Valid Email Checker offer for Drip? (Tag / Unsubscribe / Delete)

When you pick a Drip tagged group and switch the Valid Email Checker modal to Clean List Automatically, the cleanup panel exposes three actions per result category. The dropdown labels read Keep, Unsubscribe, and Delete. The category rows (Invalid, Disposable, Catch-all, Unknown, Risky) match every other integration. What changes is how each action lands inside Drip.

How each action behaves

• Keep — VEC writes nothing back to Drip. The subscriber stays put. Tags, custom fields, event history, and workflow membership are untouched.
• Unsubscribe — VEC calls the Drip API to flip the subscriber to Unsubscribed status. The subscriber stays in the database with all tags, custom fields, and historical events intact. They stop receiving broadcasts and workflow emails but remain visible in reporting.
• Delete — VEC removes the subscriber from Drip entirely. The associated event history, tags, and custom fields go with them. Order data attached at the store level (Shopify, BigCommerce) is independent of Drip and remains in the connected commerce platform.

Default settings

The defaults match every non-ConvertKit integration. Only Invalid and Disposable are enabled out of the box.

The Use Recommended Settings link snaps the panel back to defaults whenever you want. Combine these settings with the list selection in how to select a Drip list to verify.

What Drip preserves on Unsubscribe

• Tags stay attached to the subscriber row.
• Custom fields (Drip custom subscriber fields) are preserved.
• Event history (purchases, page views, product views) is retained for analytics and segment building.
• Workflow memberships — the subscriber remains in workflows but the workflow respects the unsubscribed state and skips email steps.

Why the title says Tag and the UI says Keep

Tag/Unsubscribe/Delete is the industry shorthand. Valid Email Checker uses Keep in the actual modal because that label honestly describes what happens — nothing. Some verification vendors tag every contact with their grade regardless of category; VEC leaves your Drip data alone unless you explicitly choose Unsubscribe or Delete.

The Risky category in Drip

Risky bundles risky, spamtrap, and role_account from the engine. For an e-commerce-focused workflow, the safe move is to enable Risky with Unsubscribe — spam traps in particular tank Drip deliverability, and unsubscribing them preserves audit trail and customer lifetime value reporting.