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Suppression & Compliance

Every time you send an email, your sender reputation is on the line. If you keep emailing people who've bounced, complained, or unsubscribed, email providers will start sending your messages to spam — or block you entirely.

Score CRM protects you by automatically suppressing contacts who shouldn't receive emails. You don't have to manually clean your lists — it's handled for you.

How It Works​

When something goes wrong with a delivery — a bounce, a spam complaint, or an unsubscribe — Score CRM automatically marks that contact as suppressed. Suppressed contacts are silently excluded from all future campaigns and journeys. No manual cleanup needed.

Why Contacts Get Suppressed​

ReasonWhat happenedHow it's triggered
Hard bounceThe email address doesn't exist or is permanently undeliverableAutomatic — your email provider reports it
Soft bounce (repeated)Temporary delivery failures that keep happening (full inbox, server issues)Automatic — after 5 consecutive soft bounces
Spam complaintThe recipient clicked "Report Spam" in their email clientAutomatic — your email provider reports it
UnsubscribeThe recipient clicked the unsubscribe link in your emailAutomatic — via the unsubscribe tracking link
ManualYou or a team member decided to suppress themManual — via the Score CRM dashboard
Bulk importYou uploaded a CSV of emails to suppressManual — via CSV import

Managing Suppressed Contacts​

Suppression List

Viewing Your Suppression List​

Go to Suppression in the sidebar to see all suppressed contacts. You can filter by:

  • Reason — hard bounce, soft bounce, spam complaint, unsubscribe, or manual
  • Source — how the suppression happened (automatic via provider, unsubscribe link, manual, CSV import)
  • Date range — when the suppression occurred

Suppressing a Contact Manually​

Sometimes you need to suppress a contact yourself — maybe they emailed you asking to be removed, or you know an address is invalid.

  1. Go to Suppression
  2. Click Add Suppression
  3. Enter the email address
  4. Click Suppress

Unsuppressing a Contact​

caution

Be careful with this. Only unsuppress a contact if you're sure they want to receive emails again — for example, if they reached out and confirmed. Never unsuppress contacts who filed spam complaints — this can seriously damage your sender reputation.

  1. Find the contact in the suppression list
  2. Click Unsuppress
  3. Confirm

Suppressing Contacts in Bulk​

Need to suppress a large batch of emails at once? Maybe you received a list of invalid addresses, or you're importing a do-not-email list from another platform.

  1. Go to Suppression
  2. Click Import CSV
  3. Upload a CSV file with an email column (up to 100,000 rows, 10MB max)
  4. Choose the suppression reason
  5. Submit

Import Suppression List popup

Audit Trail — Full Compliance Record​

Every suppression and unsuppression action is permanently logged. This audit trail records:

  • Which contact was affected
  • What action was taken (suppressed or unsuppressed)
  • Why (the reason)
  • When it happened
  • Who did it (for manual actions)

This log cannot be edited or deleted — giving you a complete compliance record for regulations like GDPR and CAN-SPAM.

Best Practices for a Healthy Sender Reputation​

  • Never unsuppress spam complaints — this is the fastest way to get blacklisted by email providers
  • Watch your bounce rates — a sudden spike in bounces usually means a list quality problem. Review your recent imports
  • Keep complaint rates under 0.1% — if more than 1 in 1,000 recipients report you as spam, deliverability will suffer
  • Import known-bad addresses as suppressed — if you have a list of addresses you know are invalid, suppress them before sending to prevent unnecessary bounces
  • Review suppression trends regularly — rising suppression rates can be an early warning sign of deliverability issues