Suppressed Contacts

Suppressed Contacts is the list of everyone who has unsubscribed, bounced, or complained on email, and, importantly, why. It's your compliance record and your deliverability early-warning system in one screen.

Reading the list

Each row shows the contact, when they were suppressed, and the reason:

Unsubscribe link: they clicked unsubscribe in one of your emails.
One-click unsubscribe: they used their mail client's built-in unsubscribe button.
Unsubscribed (webhook): an unsubscribe arrived from a connected service.
Marked as spam: they reported one of your emails as spam. Take this one seriously.
Bounced: mail to that address failed.
Admin re-activation: somebody on your team put them back.

Where a contact is suppressed at a connected email provider, that provider is named too: Mailchimp, MailerLite, Campaign Monitor, or Email Octopus.

Use Search by name or email to find a specific person, and Refresh to pull the latest.

Re-activating someone

If a contact has asked to be added back, you can do it here. Re-activating clears the suppression, makes them eligible for future campaigns, and records who did it and when on their timeline.

That audit trail is the point. Re-activating someone is a consent decision, and the record of who made it is what you'll want if it's ever questioned. Only re-activate people who have actually asked.

Re-activating from the contact record

You don't have to come to this screen to see whether someone can be emailed. When a contact can't currently receive your email, their record's sidebar shows an Email status section:

A red Do Not Email badge means the contact is marked Do Not Email here in ContactDrive.
An amber Provider still unsubscribed badge, naming the provider (for example "Provider still unsubscribed (Mailchimp)"), means the Do Not Email checkbox is clear in ContactDrive but a connected email provider (Mailchimp, MailerLite, Campaign Monitor or Email Octopus) still has them opted out.

In the amber case, a Re-activate button sits next to the badge. To use it:

Make sure the contact really has asked to hear from you again.
Click Re-activate.
Read the confirmation and click Yes, re-activate.

ContactDrive records the consent on the contact's timeline and shows Consent recorded. The provider doesn't change instantly: the contact is added back on its next sync.

The button appears only for people who can both edit contacts and log activity, since re-activating does both.

The "Do Not Email" gotcha

This is the part that confuses people, so it's worth reading twice.

Clearing the Do Not Email checkbox on a contact's form does not record consent. It only clears the flag here in ContactDrive. The contact's email provider still has them unsubscribed, so your next sync leaves them out and your campaigns still skip them.

That's why contacts whose Do Not Email was cleared on the contact form still appear on this list, and why their record shows Provider still unsubscribed. It looks contradictory until you know what it means: the checkbox and the suppression are two different things, and only re-activating records the consent and lets the next sync add them back.

So: if someone genuinely asked to be re-subscribed, re-activate them, either here or with Re-activate on their contact record. Unchecking the box on their contact record won't do it.

Saving a contact's form keeps their Do Not Contact and opt-out checkboxes exactly as they were stored unless you change them yourself.

Delivery failures that don't suppress

Not every failed email means the address is bad. If the recipient's email provider blocked a message, or a message expired after repeated delivery attempts, ContactDrive records the failure on the contact's timeline and in the campaign report, but doesn't mark the contact Do Not Email. They stay eligible for your next campaign.

A hard bounce, where the address itself doesn't work, still suppresses the contact and shows on this list as Bounced.

Contacts who were suppressed by those softer failures before this change are not restored automatically. If you recognize people on this list who should be receiving your email, check the failure on their timeline, and re-activate the ones whose address still works.