Blacklist and suppression

The Blacklist is the set of addresses IGSendMail will not send to. It is the safety net that stops a bad address from being mailed again after it has already caused a problem. When you finish this page you will know what ends up there, how to add entries of your own, and why removing an entry is almost always the wrong move.

Open it at Blacklist.

Suppression is account-wide#

This is the part people get wrong, so it comes first.

The Blacklist applies to your whole account, not to one list. A suppressed address is not mailed by any campaign, on any list, through any automation. Importing it onto a different list does not make it mailable again.

That is the correct behavior and it is worth understanding rather than fighting. A person who marked your email as spam does not want mail from you on a different list either. The suppression follows the address, not the record.

What lands there automatically#

Three things suppress an address without you doing anything.

Hard bounces. A permanent rejection means the mailbox does not exist or the domain does not accept mail. Sending to it again produces another bounce and nothing else, so the address is suppressed after the bounce is processed.

Spam complaints. When a recipient marks your email as spam and their provider reports it back, that address is suppressed. This is not optional and it is not negotiable. Continuing to mail someone who has reported you is the fastest route to having your mail filtered for everyone.

Unsubscribes. Someone who opts out is not mailed again. An unsubscribe registers against the list they left, and the address is not mailable from that list regardless of what a later import says.

See Bounces and complaints for the processing detail.

Why this protects you#

Mailbox providers judge a sender on patterns, and the pattern they punish hardest is repeated sending to addresses that have already rejected you. Every repeat bounce and every repeat complaint from the same address is worse than the first one, because the first can be a mistake and the second is a decision.

Suppression turns that from something you have to remember into something that happens by default. It costs you a handful of contacts you could not have reached anyway, and it protects delivery to the contacts you can.

There is a legal dimension as well. In most jurisdictions, continuing to mail someone who unsubscribed is a straightforward violation, whether or not it was deliberate.

Add addresses yourself#

You can add entries to the Blacklist directly. Reasons to do so:

• Someone asked to be removed by replying to a campaign rather than clicking unsubscribe. Add them by hand, immediately, and do not make them ask twice.
• A complaint reached you through another channel, such as a support ticket or a social message.
• You know an address is a role account or a trap and you want it excluded from every send.
• A competitor or an unhappy contact keeps signing up through your forms.

To add one, open Blacklist and add the address. From that point it is excluded from sending across the account.

Blocking a whole domain

You can suppress a domain as well as a single address. Every address at that domain is then excluded.

Use it for a domain that is generating complaints across many addresses, for a competitor's domain, or for a disposable-address service that keeps appearing in your signups.

Never re-import a suppressed address#

Sooner or later someone will suggest re-uploading an old file to "get those contacts back". Do not.

• The addresses that hard bounced still do not exist. Re-importing them produces the same bounces and pushes your bounce rate back up.
• The people who complained still do not want your email. Reaching them again produces another complaint, and repeat complaints from the same address do disproportionate damage.
• The people who unsubscribed asked you to stop. Mailing them anyway is a legal problem as well as a reputation one.

Suppression holding through an import is a feature, not an obstacle. If your plan for growing your list depends on defeating it, the plan is the problem.

The one legitimate exception is a person who genuinely wants back in and tells you so. The clean way to handle that is to have them sign up again through your form, so the new consent is recorded with a date and a source. Removing them from the Blacklist by hand and importing them from an old file is not the same thing, and you will have no record of consent if it is ever questioned.

Reading the Blacklist#

Scan it occasionally rather than only when something breaks. The entries tell you where your list problems come from.

• A cluster of hard bounces at one company domain usually means a layoff or a domain change, not a data problem.
• A run of complaints shortly after a particular signup source started sending you contacts means that source is not producing people who want your mail. Fix the source.
• Steady complaints across an old segment mean it is time for the re-engagement and removal cycle in List hygiene.

If a real contact was suppressed by mistake#

It happens, usually when a temporary server problem was reported as a permanent failure, or when someone else on a shared mailbox clicked the spam button.

Confirm the mailbox is live before you do anything, using verification. If it comes back deliverable and the person has told you directly that they want your email, you can remove the entry. Treat this as a rare, deliberate act on a single address that you have checked, never as a bulk operation over a list of entries you have not.