The goal of this article is to explain the difference between suppression and unsubscribing, including who can manage these actions (admins, account users, and contacts) and their affects.

NOTE: "Account users" are users in the account (such as staff) who have not been granted full Administrator privileges but who can perform a limited number of admin tasks.

Unsubscribe

Unsubscribing is an action taken by contacts to indicate their preference to no longer receive certain messages, based on Message Categories. Contacts who unsubscribe from a Message Category will no longer receive messages associated to that Message Category.

Unsubscribe notes

• Contacts have complete control over their own subscriptions, both in terms of subscribing and unsubscribing.
• 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

Suppressing a contact means they'll no longer receive any email messages from your account. You can think of it as a "do not email" setting.

Suppression notes

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

TIP: Refer to Suppression types, below, for explanations of all suppressing types 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.