Managing the suppression list

Current version: 9.1

To keep your bounce rate and spam complaint rate as low as possible, you can ensure that you do not send email messages to contacts that, for example, have reported your email campaign as spam.

Note

The Custom SMTP provider does not support this functionality. To use this functionality, you must use a provider that supports it, for example, the EXM Delivery Cloud.

If an email message bounces or if the email message is marked as spam, the email address is automatically added to the suppression list and will not receive another email message again, even if the email address is included in an email campaign.

An email address is automatically added to the suppression list when:

  • An email message sent to the email address soft bounces more than 3 times.

  • An email message sent to the email address hard bounces once.

  • A recipient marks the email message as spam.

If you are using EXM Delivery Cloud, the Email Experience Manager (EXM) suppression list synchronizes with the EXM Delivery Cloud suppression list every hour by default. This means that the suppression list in EXM does not always include the latest updates from EXM Delivery Cloud. However, when you send an email campaign, EXM verifies with EXM Delivery Cloud to make sure that if any of the recipients are on the EXM Delivery Cloud suppression list, they will not receive an email message.

Set up the suppression list check

You can specify if you want EXM to check the EXM suppression list before sending the email message to the EXM Delivery Cloud.

To set up the suppression list check:

  • In the Sitecore.EmailExperience.ContentManagement.config file, in the EXM.CheckSuppressionList setting:

    • Set the value to true (default value) – EXM verifies with the EXM suppression list that a recipient is not on the suppression list before sending the email message to the EXM Delivery Cloud and then to the recipient. In this way, only email messages to recipients that are not on the EXM suppression list are sent to EXM Delivery Cloud.

    • Set the value to false – EXM sends an email message to the EXM Delivery Cloud for every recipient included in the email campaign without checking the EXM suppression list first. Then the EXM Delivery Cloud checks if a recipient is on the EXM Delivery Cloud suppression list before sending the email message to the recipient.

If you send email campaigns to millions of recipients, you can save a considerable amount of money by setting the value to true because then you only send email messages to the EXM Delivery Cloud for recipients that are not on the suppression list. However, when you set the value to true, the extra suppression list check that EXM performs is time consuming and slows down the delivery of the email campaign.

Note

Regardless of the value in this setting, contacts that appear on the EXM Delivery Cloud suppression list will never receive an email message from EXM.

Manually add an email address to the EXM suppression list

To manually add an email address from the EXM suppression list:

  1. In the EXM menu, under the Administrator section, expand Email Delivery Service and click Suppression list.

    Administrator EXM suppression list.
  2. Click Actions , and then click Add.

  3. In the Add email to suppression list dialog box, enter the relevant email address and click Add.

Note

To remove an email address from the list, on the Suppression list page, select the check boxes next to those email addresses you want to remove, click Actions , and then click Remove.

To remove an email address programmatically, use the ISuppressionManager.Delete command from the Sitecore.EDS.Core.Reporting namespace.

Export the EXM suppression list

The exported list contains information about when an email address was added to the suppression list and if it was added manually from EXM, or automatically, for example, in the case of a hard bounce.

To export the suppression list:

  1. In EXM, in the Suppression list, click Actions , and then click Export.

    Suppression list and location of the Export command in the upper right.
  2. In the Export to a CSV file dialog box, click:

    • Complete list to export all email addresses in the list.

    • Date/time range to export email addresses that were added to the suppression list in a specific time range. In the To and From fields, specify the relevant dates and times.

      Note

      If you leave the To field empty, you export all the email addresses that were added from the date you specify in the From field and up until the current date. If you leave the From field empty, you export all the email addresses that were added up until the date you specify in the To field.

      Export to CSV file dialog box.
  3. Click OK, and the list exports to your local machine.

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