Suppressions

The suppression list is the set of addresses your project will never email, whatever a broadcast or automation says. It’s the single most important safety net you have: it’s what stops you mailing someone who unsubscribed, and what keeps dead addresses from wrecking your sending reputation.

Find it under Suppressions in the sidebar.

Where entries come from

Reason	Added by
Unsubscribed	The system, when someone opts out
Bounced	The system, when the address rejects mail
Complained	The system, when someone marks your email as spam
Manual	You

The first three arrive on their own. An empty page says so: “Unsubscribes and bounces will appear here automatically.”

Suppressing an address

At the top of the page, type an address — or start typing a name and pick the contact from the results — choose a reason, and click Add.

You can also suppress from Contacts: the ⋯ menu on a row, or Actions → Add to suppressions for a selection.

Note

Suppressing is not deleting. The contact stays in your list with all their history, tags and list memberships — they’re just excluded from every send. If you re-suppress an address that’s already on the list, its original reason is kept.

Lifting a suppression

The trash icon on a row asks “Allow sending to this address again?” and removes the entry.

Think before you do this. Lifting a manual suppression you added yourself is routine. Lifting an unsubscribed, bounced or complained one means emailing someone who asked you to stop, or an address that already failed:

• Unsubscribed — mailing them again is what generates spam complaints, and in most jurisdictions it isn’t legal either.
• Bounced — the address didn’t work. It usually still doesn’t, and repeated hard bounces are what push your bounce rate over the line.
• Complained — this person reported you. There is no version of re-mailing them that ends well.

Only genuinely lift one when you know something the system doesn’t: a colleague who was suppressed by mistake, or a domain that had an outage during a send.

Why this list matters

Mailbox providers judge you on two numbers, and both are driven by mailing people you shouldn’t:

• Bounce rate — elevated at 2%, over the limit at 5%.
• Complaint rate — elevated at 0.1%, over the limit at 0.5%.

Sustained rates above those limits get your project’s sending paused and drop your sending level. The suppression list is what keeps you under them, so working around it — re-importing a cleaned-out CSV, say — is the most reliable way to lose your ability to send at all.

See Deliverability & reputation for the full picture.