Please note that contacts are available only on Marketing plans.

The status of a contact is important. The status determines if and what kind of email can be sent to the contact. Elastic Email currently supports the following statuses:

Contacts that are not "blocked" are considered "active" and will be sent the email.

Any contact that has an Engaged status has opened or clicked an email in the last six months.  These contacts are considered the most valuable.  When Contact Delivery and Optimization Tools are enabled on the account, Elastic Email can optimize delivery to these contacts.

This is more or less the "default" status for contacts that have no history.  Any new contact that is uploaded or manually added to the account will default to this status.  Note that if you are adding or uploading contacts with an Active status, you must confirm the contacts have consented to receive your communications. You can send email to Active contacts.  Contacts will also change back to Active status if they have not opened or clicked an email in the last six months.

Contacts with a transactional status have opted into a transactional email only and have opted out of marketing email. Only an email that uses isTransactional = true will be sent to these contacts. For more information on how to allow users to opt into transactional emails only see the Unsubscribe Settings guide.

Contacts with a blocked status will not be sent any email.

If a contact has an Invalid Status it means that an email was sent to the contact, but the email hard bounced with an error that indicates that the email address does not exist or is permanently unavailable. For more information about hard bounces see the Bounce Category guide.

This status means that the contact has unsubscribed from all emails. The only way to change this status back to active is when your contact resubscribes.

This status means that the contact marked the email as "Spam" or "Junk" in their email client, or reported that they never asked to receive this email from the unsubscribe page.

This status can be set up if you upload contacts that are role addresses. It is also a status that can be used to temporarily stop sending emails to the contact when desired.

The Stale status works in conjunction with the Contact Pruning settings.  When Contact Pruning is enabled, any contact that exceeds the limits that are set is changed to a Stale status.

This status is used for any contact that has subscribed using the Double Opt-in Web Form but has not yet verified their email address via the activation email. The contact needs to click the link in the activation email to become Active.

You can change a contact's status by finding it in any of your contact lists. Select the contact and choose More actions>Change status from the resulting dropdown.

There are three contact statuses that cannot be changed manually:

Complaint

NotConfirmed

Unsubscribed

These statuses are reserved to be changed automatically after your recipient's action.

Re-uploaded addresses keep their previous status. So, if you have the contact that has a status of Complaint, after re-uploading it, it will still have status Complaint (even if you uploaded it as Active). While uploading, we will remove duplicate contacts.