What Is the Suppression List?
The suppression list is a safeguard that prevents Revrep from sending emails to contacts who should not receive them. Contacts are added to the suppression list automatically when certain events occur, and they are blocked from future enrollments until removed.
You can view your full suppression list from the Suppressions page, organized into four categories.
Suppression Categories
Bounces
A bounce occurs when an email cannot be delivered to the recipient's address. Common causes include:
- The email address does not exist
- The recipient's mailbox is full
- The receiving server rejected the message
- The domain is invalid or no longer active
What happens: The contact's status is set to bounced. They are added to the suppression list and excluded from all future enrollments. Any active enrollments for that contact are stopped.
Detection: Revrep checks for bounces via IMAP polling every 15 minutes. Bounces can also be detected through webhooks from your email provider.
Unsubscribes
When a recipient clicks the unsubscribe link in your email, they are opting out of future communication.
What happens: The contact's status is set to unsubscribed. They are added to the suppression list. All active enrollments for that contact are cancelled — not just the one they unsubscribed from.
Important: Respecting unsubscribes is both a legal requirement and critical for your sender reputation. Continuing to email someone who has unsubscribed can result in spam complaints and provider penalties.
Complaints
A complaint occurs when a recipient marks your email as spam in their email client. This is the most serious suppression type.
What happens: The contact's status is set to complained. They are suppressed from all future sending. Complaint rates are closely monitored by mailbox providers — Google requires that your spam complaint rate stays below 0.3%.
If you see complaints: Immediately review the affected campaign. Consider whether your targeting is too broad, your messaging is too aggressive, or your contacts did not expect to hear from you.
Bad Data
Contacts can be flagged as bad_data when their information is incomplete or clearly invalid. This might include:
- Malformed email addresses that pass basic validation but are clearly wrong
- Contacts missing critical fields needed for your sequences
- Contacts manually flagged by you or your team
What happens: Bad data contacts appear in the Suppressions page and are prevented from being enrolled. Unlike bounces and unsubscribes, the bad data flag can be cleared to make the contact eligible again.
Automatic Protection
Revrep automatically prevents sending to suppressed contacts at every level:
- Enrollment time: Suppressed contacts are skipped during the enrollment process and reported as skipped
- Send time: Even if a contact was enrolled before being suppressed, the system validates eligibility before each send and will skip suppressed contacts
- Re-enrollment: You cannot re-enroll a suppressed contact until their suppression is removed
Removing Suppressions
You can manually remove a contact from the suppression list from the Suppressions page. Each category has a remove action.
Use caution when removing suppressions. Sending to a previously bounced email address will likely bounce again and further damage your sender reputation. Only remove a bounce suppression if you have confirmed the email address has been fixed or was incorrectly flagged.
For unsubscribes, removing the suppression means you are choosing to re-contact someone who explicitly asked to stop receiving your emails. This should only be done if the contact has directly communicated (outside of email) that they want to hear from you again.
Keeping Your Suppression List Healthy
Best practices:
- Verify emails before sending. Use email verification to catch invalid addresses before they bounce. This is the most effective way to keep your bounce rate low.
- Monitor your bounce rate. Keep it below 2%. If it exceeds 3%, stop sending and clean your contact list.
- Monitor complaints. Any complaints should be investigated. A complaint rate above 0.1% is a warning sign.
- Clean your lists regularly. Remove contacts who have been emailed multiple times with zero engagement. Even if they have not bounced, persistently unengaged contacts can hurt your sender reputation.