Understanding Contact Statuses
Learn what active, unsubscribed, bounced, and suppressed mean
Understanding Contact Statuses
Every contact in Mailnaptic has a status that determines whether they can receive emails. Understanding these statuses is important for managing your audience and maintaining compliance.
Status Types
| Status | Can Receive Emails | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Active | Yes | The contact is in good standing and eligible to receive campaigns and automations. |
| Unsubscribed | No | The contact has opted out of receiving emails via the unsubscribe link or preference center. |
| Bounced | No | Emails to this contact have bounced. Hard bounces result in immediate suppression. Soft bounces may be retried. |
| Suppressed | No | The contact has been manually or automatically suppressed. This is a catch-all status for contacts that should not receive emails for any reason. |
| Complained | No | The contact reported one of your emails as spam via their email client. ISP feedback loops notify Mailnaptic of these complaints. |
How Statuses Change
Active to Unsubscribed
This happens when a contact clicks the unsubscribe link in your email, uses the List-Unsubscribe header, or manages their preferences through the preference center. This action is immediate and irreversible unless you manually re-subscribe the contact (with their consent).
Active to Bounced
Mailnaptic tracks bounce events from email providers. A hard bounce (permanent failure, e.g., "mailbox does not exist") immediately changes the contact's status to bounced and suppresses them. A soft bounce (temporary failure, e.g., "mailbox full") is retried. Repeated soft bounces may eventually result in suppression.
Active to Complained
When a contact marks your email as spam and the ISP sends a feedback loop report, Mailnaptic records the complaint and updates the contact's status. Continuing to send to complained contacts significantly damages your sender reputation.
Active to Suppressed
Contacts can be suppressed manually by your team or automatically by platform policies. Suppression is used when a contact should not receive emails but hasn't explicitly unsubscribed.
Filtering by Status
On the Contacts page, you can filter by status to see only contacts in a specific state. This is helpful for:
- Reviewing bounced contacts to identify list quality issues.
- Auditing complained contacts to understand complaint sources.
- Checking suppressed contacts to decide if any should be reactivated.
Impact on Campaign Sending
When you send a campaign, only contacts with an active status are included in the recipient list. Contacts who are unsubscribed, bounced, suppressed, or complained are automatically excluded, regardless of their list membership or segment match.
Compliance Implications
Respecting contact statuses is not just good practice; it's required by law. CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CASL all require that you honor unsubscribe requests and stop sending to contacts who have opted out. Mailnaptic enforces this automatically by filtering out non-active contacts at send time.