All Collections
Contacts
How to create a suppression list
How to create a suppression list

Learn how you can avoid sending emails to specific contacts.

Support Team avatar
Written by Support Team
Updated over a week ago

Sometimes, you just want to make sure that some of the contacts won't receive your emails. They may be either from your external database where they've unsubscribed earlier or were blocked for any other reason. If you keep them in a separate list, this list is called a "suppression list" or a "blocked contacts list". Below are two methods for how such lists can be managed in Elastic Email.

Method #1 (Status change)

When you upload new contacts in Elastic Email dashboard (to any list), you will find a "Set uploaded contacts status to" option - from the dropdown menu select "unsubscribed".

While "unsubscribed" contact is still part of the sending list and counts towards the number of sent emails, it will automatically be suppressed and will not receive any message.

Method #2 (Contact segmentation)

When you create a segment (dynamic contact list), it will contain only those contacts that match a specific rule. In order for it to work, you need to create at least two static lists: one with your normal contacts (let's name it "TheOKlist") and one with the contacts you want to suppress ("TheNOlist").

Now, create a segment (let's name it "TheFINALlist" with the following rule:

listname = 'TheOKlist' AND listname != 'TheNOlist'

From now on, whenever you send to "TheFINALlist", it will include contacts from "TheOKlist", but will automatically exclude the ones that are on "TheNOlist".
This method ensures that there will be no attempt to send to the blocked contact, resulting in a smaller and cleaner campaign.

Did this answer your question?