Managing unsubscribed and suppressed recipients

An unsubscribed recipient has opted out of email. A suppressed recipient or address is blocked from marketing sends, for example after a hard bounce, spam complaint, or global unsubscribe. These controls protect the recipient's choice and help you avoid sending to addresses that should not receive campaigns.

Use this guide to understand a recipient's status, review affected list memberships, and handle a request to subscribe again. A person can remain in your contacts and lists while being ineligible for marketing email.

Understand what each status means

A list's membership status and the recipient's overall sending eligibility are separate. In a list's recipient table:

• Subscribed means the membership is confirmed. Sending still depends on consent, email preferences, active suppressions, a usable address, and an enabled recipient record.
• Pending means the membership is unconfirmed and is not eligible for list-based marketing sends. It does not prove that a confirmation email has been sent. List cleanup can also leave a membership in this state.
• Unsubscribed means that membership has opted out. Keep it excluded unless the person has explicitly requested to subscribe again and the supported resubscription flow accepts them.
• Bounced means the membership is excluded from sending. It can result from bounce handling or cleanup of bounced or invalid addresses.

A suppression is a separate block that can apply across lists on your site. It may match the recipient record or the email address, so adding the same address to another list does not bypass it. A recipient can therefore appear as Subscribed in a list and still be suppressed.

Unsubscribing from one named list is different from choosing Unsubscribe from all. A global unsubscribe also blocks marketing beyond that one membership. Do not infer eligibility for another campaign from a different list's Subscribed label alone; recipient-wide preferences and consent still apply.

These statuses describe marketing eligibility. They do not delete the person's profile, erase their history, cancel a purchase, or sign them out of an account.

Find the recipient and review affected lists

Open Lists in your site's admin. Open the relevant list and search its recipient table by name or email. Check the exact address and membership status before making any changes. Search covers the recipients loaded into that view, which is limited to 2,000 records; no match in a large list is not conclusive proof that the person is absent.

To review unsubscribed or suppressed memberships across lists:

1. Return to Lists, select Clean Lists, then Get started. This scans the lists; it does not apply a cleanup action.
2. Under Which list should we clean?, choose the specific list you need to review, then select Continue. All lists is selected by default, so check the scope carefully.
3. Choose Unsubscribed recipients or Suppressed addresses, then select Continue. An issue with no matches is unavailable.
4. Review the email addresses, list names, membership statuses, and total matched count. The preview shows up to 100 memberships; any action applies to all matches in the selected scope, not only the displayed rows.
5. If you only needed to investigate, select Back to lists. Changes are applied only when you reach the final step and select Run cleanup.

For the complete scan, action, and recovery steps, see Cleaning an email list.

You need permission to manage lists and view recipient details to use Clean Lists. Suppressing addresses requires separate suppression-management permission. If a control is missing or disabled, see Why can't I see or use a feature?.

The scan covers active lists and excludes cleanup review segments. It is not a complete directory of every suppression on your site: an address without a membership in those lists may not appear. Counts represent memberships, so the same person can appear in several lists or match more than one issue.

Choose an action without losing the opt-out

After reviewing the matches, select Continue to reach the cleanup choices. For unsubscribed or already suppressed recipients, choose between:

• Remove them from sending: keep the records in the selected lists but make their memberships inactive for sending. Existing Unsubscribed memberships stay unsubscribed. Other memberships cleaned for suppression become Pending. This does not clear the suppression or restore consent.
• Copy them to a review segment: collect matched recipients in a non-sending review list for follow-up. This does not remove or reactivate the source memberships. Use it to organize an investigation, not as a new campaign audience.

Check the selected list, issue, full match count, and action before selecting Run cleanup. There is no individual-row selection in the review table. If the batch contains people you do not intend to affect, go back and narrow the list scope or leave without running it.

The final result reports what changed. For a review segment, note its name so you can find it in Lists. If Cedros says the results changed after review, inspect the refreshed recipients before confirming again.

Suppress these addresses is offered for Invalid email addresses and Bounced addresses when you have suppression-management permission. It creates a block that applies beyond the selected list. Use it only after reviewing why those addresses should be blocked. It is not an option for clearing existing suppressions, and the number of new suppressions can be lower than the matched membership count because an address may occur in several lists or already be blocked.

Unsubscribed and suppressed records may still appear on a later scan. That is expected: keeping a record of the exclusion is different from deleting it. Do not repeatedly run cleanup just to make those counts disappear.

Understand why an address is suppressed

Common sources include a global unsubscribe, provider-reported unsubscribe, spam complaint, hard bounce, repeated soft bounces, or an administrator's cleanup action. Automatic provider handling depends on the site's email settings; a single temporary delivery failure does not necessarily create a suppression.

The Clean Lists preview identifies affected memberships, but it does not show a full suppression-reason history. If the reason is unclear, ask the person managing your site's email to investigate the recipient's delivery and unsubscribe history before attempting a change.

Match the next step to the reason:

• Unsubscribe: retain the exclusion unless the person makes a fresh request to receive the relevant messages.
• Spam complaint: keep the address excluded while the email administrator investigates the complaint and any new request from the recipient.
• Hard bounce or invalid address: verify the address with the person through an appropriate existing contact channel. Correcting a typo is not evidence of marketing consent and does not automatically clear an existing block.
• Repeated temporary failures: investigate the delivery problem before attempting to restore sending. Repeatedly importing or adding the address does not resolve the underlying failure.
• Unexpected administrative block: provide the list name, address, approximate time, and action that preceded the block so the email administrator can review it.

Do not delete and recreate a contact, change its address to evade a block, or move it into a new list as a workaround. Address-based suppressions can continue to apply, and removing history makes the original choice harder to verify.

Let recipients manage their preferences

When your site's preference center is enabled and a recipient's email includes a preference link, the recipient can use that personal link to manage the public lists offered there. Private lists are not offered in the preference center.

For a recipient who wants to stop receiving a particular list:

1. Open the preference link in their own email and check the displayed address.
2. Set the relevant list to Unsubscribed. Keep the other list selections as intended.
3. To stop marketing across the site instead, select Unsubscribe from all.
4. Select Save preferences and wait for Your email preferences were saved.

A message's unsubscribe link can be scoped to a list or to the recipient globally. Do not promise that every unsubscribe link affects only the campaign's displayed list.

The preference link is personal to the recipient. Do not forward it to someone else or post it in a shared support thread. If it is invalid or the preference center is unavailable, the recipient should contact the site's support team with the address and the messages they want to stop.

Selecting Subscribed does not override an active suppression or another recipient-wide block. Leaving Unsubscribe from all unchecked is not an instruction to undo a previous global unsubscribe. A saved-preferences message confirms that the request was processed; it is not proof that the address is eligible for a campaign.

Handle a request to subscribe again

Start with the person's fresh request, the exact address, and the list or type of messages they want. A previous purchase, existing contact profile, visitor tag, or old import file is not a new subscription request.

Where the preference center offers the list, the recipient can choose Subscribed and save their preferences. Cedros accepts that change only when the recipient is not blocked. Verify the resulting membership and eligibility rather than assuming the confirmation message removed every restriction.

For an administrator-managed CSV import, Re-subscribe contacts who previously opted out is a separate option requiring fresh consent and the appropriate permission. Leave it off for anyone who has not requested resubscription. It does not reactivate suppressed addresses. Follow Importing contacts from a CSV to validate the file, choose subscription options, and review skipped records.

Add recipient, rebuilding Site Users, and adding someone to a tag-based audience are not suppression-removal tools. Clean Lists also has no action to lift a suppression. If the person still cannot subscribe, ask your email administrator or support team to review the reason and available recovery path; do not repeatedly attempt the same addition.

Keep the request and its scope available to the person reviewing it. A request for one newsletter should not be treated as permission for unrelated messages.

Check the result and resolve discrepancies

After an authorized change, reopen the relevant list and confirm the exact recipient's status. If you used Clean Lists, compare the completion result with the action and scope you selected. Review a new scan when needed, remembering that retained exclusions can continue to appear.

The list says Subscribed, but the recipient is skipped. Check for an active suppression, a newsletter or all-email preference that is unsubscribed or paused, missing or withdrawn consent, an invalid or automated address, or a disabled recipient. The list label alone does not determine whether Cedros can send.

The list says Pending after cleanup. Removing a suppressed membership from sending can deliberately leave it unconfirmed. This does not send a confirmation message or clear the original suppression.

The import or manual addition was skipped. Read the reported reason. Prior opt-outs, bounced membership, suppression, preferences, and consent can all prevent an addition. A successful import job does not mean every row became subscribed.

The suppression count differs from the recipient count. Review scope and units first. One address can have memberships in several lists, and a cleanup scan does not cover suppressed addresses outside its active lists.

A recipient still received an email after opting out. Compare the exact address, message type, list, and send time with the unsubscribe time. An opt-out cannot recall a message already delivered or handed to an email provider. Ask your email administrator to investigate later sends rather than testing the exclusion by sending another campaign to that person.

For help, provide the affected list, the status or skipped reason, the approximate time, and the action attempted. Share the affected address only through the appropriate support channel, without forwarding personal preference links or a full recipient export. See Getting help with your Cedros site.