Overview
Whilst you can spend a lot of time making sure the right people get the right emails, it can also be just as important to make sure the wrong people don't get emails too.
This article looks to set you in the right direction and help you find what you need when it comes to suppressing contacts.
Ways to suppress contacts using the system
Our flexible suppression system allows you to have tight control over who does - and who doesn't - receive emails from your account.
The system can be used to:
- Suppress a specific contact or list of contacts (they can be suppressed across all of your address books, or suppressed for a specific address book only)
- Suppress all contacts from a certain domain
- Automatically suppress a contact if their email system bounces your emails
- Suppress contacts on our Global Suppression List (GSL)
You can make use of suppressions to temporarily, or permanently, stop contacts from receiving your emails.
Good to know
You can also use our segments tool to exclude contacts from specific campaign sends.
What is possible with ISP complaint suppressions? I seem to have quite a few people who haven't complained about my company (let's call me Lovely Nice Company) or my campaigns (they aren't in my suppression lists) but are still being rejected if they are in API address book imports. I'm guessing this is because they are "ISP Complaint" in the GSL.
I'm having to say sorry you can't get our service on that email address because at some point in the past you compained about email from someone (let's call them EvilCo). This is a bit unsatisfactory. Is there any way for the end user to say "Please let me have emails from Lovely Nice Company but still exclude EvilCo"?
Hi Andy,
If you're Lovely Nice Company and have just completed an upload, you can remove email addresses by known hard bouncers or complainers separately through the GSL. EvilCo's email marketing practices do not affect your suppressions but give us one of over 200 factors that make up the watchdog, just because they have unsubscribed from their emails doesn’t mean they don’t want to receive yours and we would never stop that.
Uploading through the API works in the same way, if the number is too high for any combination of the factors i.e. hard bounce, complainers and invalid it may reject the list from being uploaded.
Once into the system either via the API or other upload method, it is up to you the client to decide to email or suppress these contacts.
If you email the rejection details or message back to support@dotmailer.com, one of the team can look into this in more detail.
Hi,
On a recent mailer we had one hard bounce and on investigation it's because one character was wrong in the email address - is there any way to edit the supressed record and re-add it to our contact list?
Hi Ben,
There isn't a way in the app to edit the suppressed record, however if you contact our support team via email to support@dotmailer.com or using the form at https://support.dotmailer.com/tickets/new and let them know the email address of the contact, they can resubscribe it for you. You'll need to be sure to edit the contact back to a valid address before you send again, otherwise it will hardbounce all over again!