Admins, account users (such as staff), and contacts can manage which messages get sent (admins) and which they receive (contacts).

NOTE: "Account users" are users in the account who have not been granted Administrator privileges, but who can perform a limited number of admin tasks.

This article explains:

• the difference between suppression and unsubscribing,
• who manages which, and
• the affects of these actions.

Unsubscribe

Unsubscribe is an action taken by contacts to indicate their preference to longer receive certain messages, based on message categories. Contacts who unsubscribe from a message category will not be sent any email messages that are sent to subscribers to the category.

Unsubscribe notes

• Contacts can self-subscribe and self-unsubscribe.
• Subscriptions are per message category. Unsubscribing from one message category has no impact on other message category subscriptions.
• Admins and account users can manage subscribes and unsubscribes, per contact, on the Subscribe/Unsubscribe Recipient page:
  • Contacts > List > [select_contact] > More > Subscriptions

For more information, see Create & Manage Contacts.

Suppression

Suppression prevents the suppressed contact from receiving any email messages from the account. You can think of it as a "do not email" setting, i.e., the contact will not be sent any email messages from the account.

Suppression notes

• Suppression is an "all or nothing" action; you cannot suppress some messages from being sent to a contact who is suppressed.
• Suppression can be an initiated by admins, account users, contacts, or an automatic action.

TIP: Refer to Suppression types, below, for explanations of all the types of suppression and how they're triggered.

• Contacts can request to be suppressed, but they cannot self-suppress or self-unsuppress.
• Admins and account users can manage suppression [per contact or multiple]:
  • Suppress: Contacts > List > [select_contact] > More > Suppress
  • Unsuppress: Contacts > List > Suppressed > [select_contact] > Unsuppress

TIP: Both of these pages have multi-select capability to simultaneously act on multiple contacts and an Upload option to manage contacts in bulk.

For more information, see Create & Manage Contacts.

Suppression types

The following table lists and describes the various types of suppression.