Unsubscribes and suppression
How Pombo stops emailing someone, and why it's permanent.
Suppression is tracked on the contact's status, not in a separate list.
The statuses
- subscribed: mailable.
- unsubscribed: the person opted out. Marketing skips them; transactional email still reaches them, because a receipt is not a promotion.
- bounced: a hard bounce. The address is not deliverable. Suppressed for everything, including transactional.
- complained: the person marked mail from your organization as spam. Suppressed for everything.
- undeliverable: the address was refused before delivery was attempted, because it does not exist, cannot receive mail, or scored too low on validation. Suppressed for everything. Unlike a bounce, no mailbox ever accepted the message.
Why re-import doesn't help
Importing a bounced or complained address again does not clear it. That's
deliberate: the record is what stops Pombo from mailing a dead address or
someone who reported you, and losing it is a deliverability and compliance
problem. If an address genuinely recovered, contact us.
Unsubscribing versus deleting
To stop emailing someone, set them to unsubscribed. Deleting the contact
destroys the record that they opted out, so the next import would start mailing
them again.
There's no cost to keeping them. Unsubscribes are free: only subscribed contacts count toward your plan's contact limit, so unsubscribed, bounced and undeliverable contacts never use up room.
One-click unsubscribe
Marketing mail carries a List-Unsubscribe header and a footer link. Both point
at the same per-contact URL and set the status to unsubscribed immediately.