What is a suppressed list?
An email suppressed list is your "do not send to" list. If someone is on your suppressed list, you cannot send email to them. Even if you upload the same contact again, we recognize that the address is suppressed and keep them on the suppressed list, ensuring your safety.
How does a contact get onto my suppressed list?
We automatically put all your bounced, unsubscribed, marked as spam and unconfirmed subscribers onto the suppressed list, when those actions happen. Bounced emails are retried (just in case) and the email address is moved back to the active subscribers list if the email is successfully delivered.
Specific reasons why an email address gets added to the suppressed list are:
- Unsubscribed: These contacts clicked the unsubscribe link in one of your mailings.
- Manually suppressed: These contacts were manually added to the suppressed list by you, in your account.
- Unconfirmed: These contacts have not yet confirmed their subscription through your double opt-in signup form. Once they click the confirmation link they received via email, the contact will automatically move to the right list in your active subscribers.
- Marked as spam: These contacts have clicked the spam button in their inbox for one of your mailings.
- Hard bounce: These are contacts with completely undeliverable email addresses, most likely because the address doesn't exist.
- Soft bounce: These are contacts with emails that are undeliverable, but the issue may clear itself up or change. This is often due to full mailboxes or domains temporarily being down. All soft bounces are automatically retried, so they may only be suppressed for a short time.
- General bounce: This is the miscellaneous category of undeliverable addresses. Common reasons are firewalls on the contact's server that stops incoming email from outside the network. This is common in the case of corporations that don’t receive email from unknown sources. All general bounces are automatically retried, so they may be only temporarily suppressed.
Why is the suppressed list important?
It's very important that you don't send email to anyone who has unsubscribed or marked your email as spam, or whose email address has bounced. If you're using a double opt-in signup form, you also shouldn't send to anyone who hasn't confirmed their address. Good delivery depends on you sending to only a safe, healthy list. Sending to addresses that have been suppressed runs you the risk of bad delivery quality and abuse complaints, and your account could potentially be suspended.
