Suppression lists

Suppression list is a list of email addresses, email domains and phone numbers, which you do not want to send messages to. Suppression list filters email addresses, email domains, and phone numbers at moment of mailing launch. Suppression lists are formed to follow CAN-SPAM law rules.

Three types of black lists are used in the platform:

• Global Platform suppression list — affects mailings in all platform Accounts. If hard bounce is returned for the email address, it goes to global list. Valid addresses, that must be restricted from mailing, are stored separately.
• Global Account suppression list — it is created automatically in every account of the platform. Added contacts will be blocked from all Account mailings.
• User suppression lists — they are created by users in platform accounts. They can be attached to Profile databases or to Messages Templates.

Several suppression lists with certain rules are considered, because segment (which can contain several databases with suppresion lists) and several messages can be used in the mailing.

Global suppression list of the platform

Global suppression list of the platform affects all platform Accounts. In consists of two parts:

• Invalid emails list — all emails, for which hard bounce (address does not exist) was received from email provider, go to this list.

caution

Take your notice, that when such answer has been received, Subscription status of the customers changes to hard bounce. These subscriptions will not be used in the mailings, because sending to non-existing addresses makes sender reputation with mail service worse.

If you change status of these subscriptions to Subscribed — they will stay in the global list and will not be processed. To resubscribe these customers, you need to remove them from global suppression list of the platform.

• Global suppression list — any addresses or any domains for all Accounts of the platform. Platform Administrator can add data in this list, using Administrative panel.

Account suppression lists

To access Account suppression lists management, choose Data —> Suppression lists in the main menu. This will open a menu displaying the existing suppression lists for your account. From there, you can use the quick actions menu to begin working with the desired suppression list immediately:

Global Account suppression list

One global suppression list is created automatically in every Altcraft Account. It always applies to all mailings within the Account, so you do not need to attach it manually to Profiles databases or Messages templates.

note

The global suppression list cannot be deleted or renamed — it is created together with the Account. Only its content can be managed: contacts are added and removed manually or via the API, and imported from a file.

Email addresses, domains, and phone numbers are added to the global suppression list the same way as to user suppression lists: manually or by importing from a file. Whole domains can be blocked too: when entered manually, the domain is extracted from the email address, and during import the value type is detected by the file content.

Subscriptions are also added to the global suppression list automatically if a message contains the global unsubscribe link — the {globalunsubscribe} variable. A subscriber who follows this link is immediately added to the global suppression list and excluded from all future mailings in the Account.

tip

Note that communications will stop only for the email address to which the message with the unsubscribe link was sent. If the profile has a subscription with a different email address, messages will continue to be delivered to it as usual.

File import

Choose appropriate point in quick actions menu to add contacts from file to suppression list. Drag your file with contacts list in CSV or XLS format into the form opened. You can upload several files, and there can be several columns in these files. Next, you can choose, which column you are going to use for the import to suppression list. After that, click Import:

Manual import

If you want to add customer contacts manually, open the desired suppression list. The suppression list stores three types of contacts, each on its own tab: Email addresses, Domains, and Phone numbers. Open the tab with the desired contact type and enter the contact details you want to add to the list in the Lock/Unlock section. Then click Check.

Two tabs will appear: Not found in suppressed and Exists in suppressed. If a domain, email address, or phone number is not in the suppression list (it will appear in Not found in suppressed), you can select it and add it (Add selected). If it is in the suppression list, you can remove it (Exclude). Additionally, you have the option to select all email addresses, all domains, or all phone numbers in tabs (Check):

tip

Multiple entries should be separated by commas, spaces, or placed on new lines. You can specify up to 500 email addresses, domains, or phone numbers.

Phone numbers should be in international format (e.g., +791****6789).

The following rules apply when adding domains:

• A domain is specified as example.com, without protocol or path. The entered value is converted to lowercase.
• If you enter an email address, the domain from its part after the @ sign is added to the suppression list. This way you can block an entire domain without listing each of its addresses.
• The list displays the domain itself, so blocking applies to all addresses of that domain.
• The match is exact: the domain example.com does not block addresses on its subdomains, such as mail.example.com. Add such addresses as separate records.

User suppression lists

Press + Create in lists menu to add user suppression list into the account. Select Suppression list name, enter Description, set access group and tags for quick search, if it is necessary:

After saving it, you can manually add customer contacts to the created suppression list or import them from a file. Additionally, you can attach the list to profile databases and templates. You also have the option to check at any time which platform objects the list is attached to.

Suppression list for a Profiles database

User suppression lists can be attached to a certain Profiles database of the Account. This list will be active only during orchestrating Mailings for an audience, which includes this profiles database. For this, choose Attached suppression list in General settings of Database editing form:

Suppression list for a Message template

The second option of using custom suppression lists is attachment to certain Messages templates. This will allow you to control, which audience should not receive certain content: all unsubcriptions by template will go this list and therefore, communications will be blocked.

Open the necessary Template, and go to Options tab, and choose necessary suppression list in Extra settings block:

Use cases for suppression lists

The choice of a suppression list depends on the task: the global Account list blocks contacts in all mailings, while user lists apply only to the mailings they are attached to.

The global Account suppression list is used when a contact must be excluded from all mailings in the Account:

• competitor and service domains that must not be mailed;
• addresses that are known to be inactive or deleted by recipients, to protect sender reputation;
• employee and partner service mailboxes not intended for mailings;
• subscribers who followed the global unsubscribe link {globalunsubscribe} — they are added to the list automatically.

A user list attached to a Profiles database restricts mailings for one business area without affecting the rest:

• the same profile is used by several business lines (retail and wholesale, different brands), but mailings are needed for only one of them;
• part of the audience has not consented to certain types of communications and must be excluded from specific mailings;
• a mailing runs on a segment built from several databases, and exclusions must apply to only one of them.

A user list attached to a Message template restricts the distribution of specific content:

• promotional templates must not be sent to profiles who agreed to receive transactional messages only;
• content is restricted by licensing or regional requirements and is unavailable to part of the audience;
• subscriptions that unsubscribed from a specific template are added to the attached list automatically when the corresponding option is enabled.

Rules of suppression lists interaction

You can use several suppression lists during mailing. Subscribers are excluded from the mailing in the following way:

1. Global suppression lists are checked, and all subscribers there are excluded from the mailing.

2. Next, suppression lists, attached to Profiles databases, excluded subscribers of their databases from mailing.

info

If there are two same subscriptions in two databases, and suppression list, which contains them, is attached only to the first database, then messages from mailing, which contains the segment with this databases, will be completely sent. This happens, because suppression list will act only on the database, that it is attached to, which is the first one.

3. Next, suppression list, which is attached to the Message template, will exclude only subscribes, who would receive this message.