How to Manage the Email Suppression List and Ensure Email Delivery in Arketa

Managing your email suppression list in Arketa is essential for maintaining effective communication with your clients while ensuring compliance with GDPR and anti-spam regulations. This guide provides an overview of the suppression list, how to access and manage it, and best practices for troubleshooting email delivery issues.

What is the Email Suppression List?

The email suppression list contains recipients who will not receive marketing emails due to delivery or complaint issues. Common reasons for being added to the suppression list include:

Manual unsubscription by the recipient.
Email address bounced as undeliverable.
Inbox marked emails as spam ("complaint" event).
Repeated temporary delivery failures.
Email provider flagged the address as invalid or inactive.
Recipient reported an email as unwanted.

Accessing and Managing the Suppression List

To locate and manage the email suppression list in Arketa:

Navigate to Settings > Communications > Email Suppression List in your admin dashboard.
Review the list of suppressed email addresses.
To allow a client to receive emails again, remove their address from the suppression list. After removal, confirm the correct email address in the client’s profile and have them request a password reset to verify delivery.

Restrictions on Removing Contacts

Due to anti-spam and marketing compliance rules, contacts can only be removed from the suppression list once per month. Attempting to re-add or force-send to suppressed addresses before this window will result in continued bounces. Ensure that you wait for the monthly removal window before attempting to restore deliverability.

Compliance and Opt-Out Mechanisms

Removing recipients from the suppression list does not re-opt in anyone who has previously opted out. GDPR consent status is respected, and only recipients who are still opted in but were suppressed for delivery-related reasons (e.g., bounces) will start receiving emails again. This ensures compliance with GDPR and other anti-spam regulations. If you need to opt out a client from marketing emails without deleting their record, open the client’s profile and update their preferences. This action removes them from marketing sends while retaining their client record.

Troubleshooting and Best Practices

If Arketa does not provide a dedicated report for opted-out recipients, you can create a client segment filtered by email status as a workaround:

Go to Clients > Segments > Create Segment.
Add a condition based on email status (e.g., email bounced/undeliverable) to isolate contacts who won’t receive emails.
Save the segment and use it to review or exclude those contacts from future sends.

Note: The segment will reflect results after subsequent email sends identify bounces or undeliverables. It won’t retroactively include future bounces until another campaign is sent. Removing an address from the suppression list applies generally, meaning the recipient will receive future broadcasts unless their email bounces again and they are re-added to the suppression list.

How can I manage the email suppression list and ensure email delivery in Arketa?