How to remove recipient suppression listed on Email Service Provider (ESP)

Maintaining a healthy sender reputation requires keeping a close eye on how Email Service Providers (ESPs) handle your outgoing messages. If you notice a sudden drop in engagement or suspect an email isn’t reaching a specific customer, they may have landed on your ESP's suppression list.

When an ESP blocks a recipient, automated safeguards kick in to protect your deliverability. This guide will show you how to determine whether a recipient has been suppressed by an ESP and the exact steps required to unblock them.

How to check if your recipient is on the ESP suppression list

There are clear signals indicating whether your recipient is blocked at the ESP level. The invalid_contact event showing up on the customer's profile of your recipient, with the source coming from ESP, is one of them.

This event indicates that the recipient's email is on the ESP suppression list, and the Bloomreach mechanism will trigger the invalid_contact event, which will automatically update the email_invalid customer attribute to Yes.

This mechanism is designed to protect you as a sender by preventing you from targeting customers who have been invalidated and to exclude such recipients from all future sendouts.

In parallel, another campaign event with status preblocked will be tracked on the same profile, providing the ultimate proof that ESP is blocking your sends. Your recipients' profile events will look like this in this situation:

More information about email bounce management can be found here

How to resolve the recipient listing on the ESP suppression list

Once you confirm the above, reach out to the support team, who may be able to remove the suppression after verifying a few details. The exact requirements depend on the ESP connected to your account.

To review and process the request, share the following details:

1. The affected recipient’s email address.

   To check the recipient's email address used for sending the email that got preblocked, open the affected customer's profile, find the campaign event with status = preblocked, and copy the recipient attribute.
   

2. The ESP or sending setup used for sending the email.
   
   To find the integration responsible for targeting the recipient similarly to the step above, open the campaign event with status preblocked and find the integration_name or integration_id.
   

3. Link/URL to your project.

   As you are already inside your project, copy the URL from the browser

   

4. Confirmation that you want us to remove the suppression for this recipient.

   ONLY For Mailjet integrations, support will also require recipients' confirmation that they wish to receive email communication from you - a screenshot of their written confirmation will suffice.

Summary

When an ESP suppresses an email, Bloomreach automatically flags the customer profile with an invalid_contact event with source stating ESP name and updates their email_invalid attribute to Yes to protect your sender reputation.

To resume sending to a specific user, locate the preblocked event on their profile to gather their email and integration details. Provide this data, along with your project URL and confirmation for unblocking (including written user confirmation for Mailjet users), to the support team to initiate the removal process.