How to Use the Suppression List

What is a suppression list?

A suppression list — or exclusion list, as it is sometimes called — is a list of recipient email addresses to which you do NOT want to send email.

Continuing to send messages to invalid email addresses or to recipients who no longer want to receive your emails can negatively impact your sender reputation. By maintaining an up-to-date suppression list, you can avoid sending unwanted messages.

Automatically added addresses

A user's email address is automatically added to the suppression list if:

  • The address hard bounces.
  • The user marks one of your emails as spam.
  • The user unsubscribes.

Manually add an email address to the suppression list

There are 2 ways you can add an email address to the suppression list - either one-by-one or bulk importing.

⚠️ An email address added to the suppression list (because they clicked unsubscribe in your email to them, or the email hard bounced) is permanent. Deleting the user record will not undo this. The address remains on the suppression list, as it is intended to work.

To add a specific email address to the suppression list:

  1. Click Email and then Suppressions.
  2. Click the Add button.
  3. Enter the email address and confirm Add.

To add multiple email addresses at once, you can import them by click on the Import button like as shown below:

The file containing the email addresses you want to import must be in the correct CSV format and should only contain the list of email addresses like as shown below (no header needed).

We recommend using Google Sheets to create/edit a CSV file since it's free, and so you can just download it in the correctly supported .csv format as shown below. 

If you're using Excel, while this may differ between versions generally you'll want to go File > Save As (as a new file), then choose CSV (Comma delimited) (*.csv) as Save as type option:

In either methods, the suppression reason will show up as " Manually added."

Remove an email address from the suppression list

To remove an email address from the suppression list in order to allow sending new emails to the recipient again, click the Reactivate button next to their address. Reactivation is only allowed for some suppressions, depending on the reason as described below:

Hard Bounces

To reactivate an address that has been suppressed due to a Hard Bounce:

  1. Click Email and then Suppressions.
  2. Use the Search box to find the recipient’s email address.
  3. Click on the Reactivate button and the email address will become active again immediately.

Spam Complaints

You should not be seeing many spam complaints, if any. However, if the recipient reaches out to you and wants to receive emails again, contact us and let us know to reactivate the recipient’s address.

Unsubscribes

If a recipient unsubscribes by clicking the Unsubscribe link in your email they'll be added to the suppression list. If the recipient reaches out to you and wants to receive emails again, contact us and let us know to reactivate the recipient’s address.

Manually Added

If you have added an email address to the suppression list the suppression reason will be "Manually added". To reactivate a manually added recipient:

  1. Click Email and then Suppressions.
  2. Use the Search box to find the recipient’s email address.
  3. Click on the Reactivate button and the email address will become active again immediately.

Please note that reactivating recipients via the above methods will not resend any previously failed messages due to the address being suppressed. This will only allow for sending new messages to this recipient again.

Still need help? How can we help? How can we help?