Manage the suppression list

With Journey Optimizer, you can monitor all the email addresses that are automatically excluded from sending in a journey, such as:

• Addresses that are invalid (hard bounces).
• Addresses that consistently soft-bounce, and could adversely affect your email reputation if you continue to include them in your deliveries.
• Recipients who issue a spam complaint of some kind against one of your email messages.

Such email addresses are automatically collected into the Journey Optimizer suppression list. Learn more on the suppression list concept and usage in this section.

You can also manually add an address or a domain to the suppression list.

Access the suppression list

To access the detailed list of excluded email addresses, go to Administration > Channels > Email configuration, and select Suppression list.

Filters are available to help you browse through the list.

You can filter on the Suppression category, Address type, or Reason. Select the option(s) of your choice for each criterion. Once selected, you can clear each filter or all filters displayed on top of the list.

If you manually add an email address or a domain by mistake, the Delete button enables you to remove that entry.

Deleting an email address or a domain from the suppression list means that you will start again delivering to this address or domain. Consequently, this can have severe impacts on your deliverability and IP reputation, which could eventually lead to your IP address or sending domain being blocked. Learn more on the importance of maintaining a suppression list in this section.

From the Suppression list view, you can also edit suppression rules. Learn more

To export the suppression list as a CSV file, select the Download CSV button.

Suppression categories and reasons

When a message fails to be delivered to an email address, Journey Optimizer determines why the delivery failed and associates it with a Suppression category.

The suppression categories are as follows:

• Hard: The email address is immediately sent to the suppression list.

  NOTE

  When the error is the result of a spam complaint, it also falls into the Hard category. The email address of the recipient who issued the complaint is immediately sent to the suppression list.

• Soft: Soft errors send an address to the suppression list once the error counter reaches the limit threshold. Learn more on retries

• Manual: You can also manually add an email address or a domain to the suppression list. Learn more

For each email address that is listed, you can also check the Type (email or domain), Reason for excluding it, who added it, and the date/time it was added to the suppression list.

The possible reasons for a delivery failure are:

Manually add addresses and domains

When a message fails to be delivered to an email address, this address is automatically added to the suppression list based on the defined suppression rule or bounce count.

However, you can also manually populate the Journey Optimizer suppression list to exclude specific email addresses and/or domains from your sending.

You may add email addresses or domains one at a time, or in bulk mode through a CSV file upload.

To do this, select the Add email or domain button, then follow one of the methods below.

Add one address or domain

1. Select the One by one option.

   

2. Choose the address type: Email address or Domain address.

3. Enter the email address or domain you want to exclude from your sending.

   NOTE

   Make sure you enter a valid email address (such as abc@company) or domain (such as abc.company.com).

4. Specify a reason if needed.

   NOTE

   All ASCII characters comprised between 32 and 126 are allowed in the Reason field. The full list can be found on this page for example.

5. Click Submit.

Upload a CSV file

1. Select the Upload CSV option.

   

2. Download the CSV template to use, which includes the columns and format below:

   TYPE,VALUE,COMMENT
   EMAIL,abc@somedomain.com,Comment
   DOMAIN,somedomain.com,Comment
   

   NOTE

   All ASCII characters comprised between 32 and 126 are allowed in the Comment column. The full list can be found on this page for example.

   You can also download this template from the Suppression list main view.

   CAUTION

   Do not change the names of the columns in the CSV template.

   The file size should not exceed 1 MB.

3. Fill in the CSV template with the email addresses and/or domains you want to add to the suppression list.

4. Once completed, drag and drop your CSV file, then click Upload file.

   

5. Click Submit.

Check recent uploads status

You can check the list of the latest CSV files you uploaded.

To do this, from the Suppression list view, click the Recent uploads button.

The latest uploads you submitted and their corresponding statuses are displayed.

If an error report is associated with a file, you can download it to check the errors encountered.

Below is an example of the type of entries you can find in the error report:

type,value,comments,failureReason
Email,examplemail.com,MANUAL,Invalid format for value: examplemail.com
Email,examplemail,MANUAL,Invalid format for value: examplemail
Email,example@mail,MANUAL,Invalid format for value: example@mail
Domain,example,MANUAL,Invalid format for value: example
Domain,example.!com,MANUAL,Invalid format for value: example.!com
Domain,!examplecom,MANUAL,Invalid format for value: !examplecom