Subscription statuses represent the current state of a Contact's permission to receive messages, and are crucial for determining both compliance and audience targeting in your communications.

A Contact can have one of the following subscription statuses:

• Available to send to
• Subscribed
• Unsubscribed
• Suppressed

NOTE: The Subscribed and Unsubscribed statuses are set per Message Category or group, while Available to send to and Suppressed are overall states. 

Subscription statuses can be managed by:

• Admins manually updating a Contact's record
• A Contact clicking an unsubscribe link in a message or via a Subscription Management Page (SMP)

See Manage Contact Subscriptions to learn how to view and manage a Contact's subscriptions.

Available to send to

The Available to send to status indicates the Contact is not suppressed and has an “active” status, meaning they're eligible to be messaged, as long as they have not unsubscribed from the specific Message Category or group

Unless previously suppressed during the onboarding process or categorized as Role Addresses (see note below), all Contacts uploaded to the system are Available to send to; these Contacts are also individuals who have opted in to receive messages via a previously established relationship with your organization.

NOTE: Role addresses (or role-based addresses) are ones such as info@, admin@, sales@, etc. These automatically get removed from any uploads to the system because they typically cause high bounce rates and spam complaints. See Understand Role-based Email Addresses to learn more. 

IMPORTANT: As a sender, it's your responsibility to ensure all Contacts you upload have explicitly consented to receive communications from you. The system can manage the “opt-out” portion of the process, but the “explicit opt-in” portion is necessary before you upload any Contact list.

A Contact’s status, when they are initially added to the account, looks like this:

Message or Group Category

Subscribed

A status of Subscribed indicates the Contact has explicitly opted in to receive messages. This is often completed via a SMP or similar process. Subscribed contacts are eligible to receive messages for the categories or groups they have opted into.

A Subscribed Contact's record looks like this:

Message or Group Category

NOTE: There is a date of the subscribe activity, and you can view the history of the Contact's unsubscribe and subscribe statuses

If your account's Unsubscribe Setting (managed on Settings > Account Profile) is Unsubscribe to Message Category, you will see the Include ALL recipients who have opted into this category checkbox on the Setup Job tab, under Additional Options, when sending a message to a group.

When checked, even if a Contact isn't in the group(s) selected on the Select Groups tab, they will still be sent the message as long as they're opted in to the Message Category assigned to the message (which is done during message creation).

Unsubscribed

An Unsubscribed status means the Contact has explicitly chosen to opt out from receiving messages. This can be triggered by clicking an unsubscribe link in a message, using the SMP, or through manual admin action. Unsubscribed contacts will not receive messages for the Categories or groups from which they've opted out.

An Unsubscribed Contact's record looks like this:

Message or Group Category

NOTE: There is a date of the unsubscribe activity, and you can view the history of the Contact's unsubscribe and subscribe statuses

Contacts can still unsubscribe from all messages, even if your account's unsubscribe setting is Unsubscribe to Message Category or Unsubscribe to Group Category. The "unsubscribe from all" action can occur via the one-click unsubscribe link or SMP link in a message.

Suppressed

Suppression is an absolute Do Not Send status. Once a Contact is suppressed, they will no longer receive any emails from your account. Suppression takes precedence over all other statuses.

Suppression reasons

There are a variety of reasons for suppression:

Admin-driven suppression

• Campaign: Automatically suppressed via a user-defined campaign action.
• List upload: A user uploaded a list of multiple Contacts to be suppressed.
• Suppressed across accounts: Automatically suppressed via a regularly scheduled task which finds suppressed Contacts in one account and applies them to another linked account.

Automatic suppression

• Auto non-engaged suppress: An optional functionality that is enabled based on rules set by Higher Logic's deliverability department or by the client. Automatically suppressed via an account rule to suppress Contacts with consecutive “Non Opens”.
• Bad domain: Automatically suppressed via an account rule to suppress Contacts with two consecutive “bad domain” bounces.
• User not found: Automatically suppressed via an account rule to suppress Contacts with two consecutive “user not found” bounces.

Contact-driven suppression

• Manage subscription: Contact indicated preference via a subscription page.
• Spam complaint: Automatically suppressed after the Contact clicked on a “report spam” type button or link while reviewing an email. This can only be reversed when Higher Logic's Support team receives an email from the Contact requesting to be re-subscribed.