Email suppression
How opt-outs and bounces are automatically excluded from future sends, and how to manage your subscriber list.
On this page
When a contact opts out or their address bounces, OrganizeOS adds them to a suppression list for your organization. Suppressed addresses are filtered out automatically before every send, so you do not need to remove them by hand.
What suppression is
Suppression is a per-organization list of addresses that will not receive future campaigns. Once an address is suppressed, it is excluded from every subsequent send regardless of which segment you target. Matching ignores letter case, so an address suppressed as Jane@Example.org also covers jane@example.org. The check happens automatically as each campaign's recipients are resolved, so a suppressed contact cannot accidentally receive a message even if they are still in a segment, and the audience count in the composer already leaves them out.
The suppression check fails closed: if the check itself encounters an error, the contact is treated as suppressed rather than sent to. This ensures that a technical failure can never result in a message reaching someone who should not receive it.
Unsubscribe links
Every campaign and automation email sent through OrganizeOS includes an unsubscribe link at the bottom. When a recipient follows it and confirms, they are opted out immediately and skipped on all future sends for your organization.
Recipients can also use the Unsubscribe button their mail app shows next to your sender name (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Apple Mail and others). One press opts them out the same way, with no page to visit. Either way, no manual action is required on your part, and the opt-out works whatever your organization's visibility setting is.
See Sending an email campaign for how campaigns are composed and sent.
How bounces and complaints are handled
Delivery events are processed automatically from your email provider:
| Event | How it is handled |
|---|---|
| Hard bounce | Address is suppressed immediately. A hard bounce means the address is invalid or permanently unreachable. |
| Spam complaint | Address is suppressed immediately. A complaint is recorded when a recipient marks your message as spam. |
| Soft bounce | Treated as a temporary delivery failure. The provider keeps retrying, and the recipient shows as Bounced on the campaign report only until a later delivery succeeds; soft bounces are never suppressed. |
| Mail-client unsubscribe | When a recipient presses the Unsubscribe button their mail app shows, the address is suppressed exactly like a link unsubscribe. |
Hard bounces and spam complaints are the most damaging events for your sender reputation, which is why they trigger immediate suppression. Each of these events also marks the contact as unsubscribed everywhere in the workspace, so the Subscribers page and the contact record agree with the send list.
Viewing your subscriber list
Open Outreach in the workspace sidebar and select Subscribers under Email. The subscribers view lists your organization's contacts along with their subscription status. You can filter by:
- Subscribed (the default view): contacts who are opted in and eligible to receive campaigns
- Unsubscribed: contacts who have opted out or whose addresses have been suppressed
- All: every contact regardless of status
You can also search by name or email address. Filters and search apply to your whole contact list, not just the rows currently on screen, and the count tiles at the top of the page always describe the full list. Each row shows the contact's name, email address, the date they subscribed, their subscription status, their engagement level based on past campaign activity, and whether they are a member or donor. Selecting the link icon on any row opens that contact's full record in the CRM.
Large lists load in batches. When more contacts match than are shown, the page says how many were loaded out of how many match and offers Load more. For a complete list of everyone matching a filter, export from the CRM.
Why this matters for deliverability
Email providers and inbox filters evaluate your sender reputation based on how your recipients respond to your messages. Sending to addresses that have bounced, complained, or opted out increases bounce rates and complaint rates, which can cause future campaigns to land in spam folders or get blocked entirely.
Honoring opt-outs also preserves the relationship with your supporters. A contact who unsubscribes and later re-engages through other channels remains in your CRM; they are only excluded from email sends.