Manage the suppression list

With Journey Optimizer, you can monitor all the email addresses that are automatically excluded from sending in a journey or a campaign, such as hard bounces, soft bounces, and spam complaints.

Such email addresses are automatically collected into the Journey Optimizer suppression list. A suppression list consists of addresses and domains to exclude from your audiences. It gathers email addresses and domains that are suppressed across all mailings in a single client environment, meaning specific to an organization ID associated with a sandbox ID.

Learn more about the suppression list concept and usage in this section.

In addition, you can leverage the Journey Optimizer Suppression REST API to control your outgoing messages using suppression and allow lists. Learn how to work with the Suppression REST API

Access the suppression list

To access the detailed list of excluded email addresses and domains, browse to Administration > Channels > Email settings, and select Suppression list.

Filters are available to help you browse through the list.

You can filter on the Suppression category, Address type, or Reason. Select one or more options for each criterion. Once selected, you can clear each filter or all filters displayed on top of the list.

Understand failure reasons

When a message fails to be delivered to an email address, Journey Optimizer determines why the delivery failed and associates it with a Suppression category.

The suppression categories are as follows:

• Hard: A hard bounce indicates an invalid email address (i.e. an email address that does not exist). This involves a bounce message from the receiving email server that explicitly states that the address is invalid. The email address is immediately sent to the suppression list.

  When the error is the result of a spam complaint, it also falls into the Hard category. The email address of the recipient who issued the complaint is immediately sent to the suppression list.

• Soft: A soft bounce is a temporary email bounce that occurred for a valid email address. The email address is added to the suppression list after several retries. Soft errors send an address to the suppression list once the error counter reaches the limit threshold. Learn more about retries

• Manual: Manual errors have been added manually to the suppression list. Learn more

For each email address that is listed, you can also check the Type (email or domain), Reason for excluding it, who added it, and the date/time it was added to the suppression list.

Possible reasons for a delivery failure are:

Suppression rules

From the Suppression list view, you can also edit the retry parameter associated to the suppression rules from the Edit suppression rules button. Use this option to update the retry threshold for the current sandbox. Learn more about retries.

Add addresses and domains to the suppression list

When a message fails to be delivered to an email address, this address is automatically added to the suppression list based on the defined suppression rule or bounce count.

However, you can also manually populate the Journey Optimizer suppression list to exclude specific email addresses and/or domains from your sending.

You may add email addresses or domains one at a time, or in bulk mode through a CSV file upload.

Add one address or domain

To add an email address or a domain to the suppression list, follow the steps below:

1. Select the Add email or domain button.

   

2. Choose the One by one option.

   

3. Select the address type: Email or Domain.

4. Enter the email address or domain you want to exclude from your sending.

   NOTE

   Make sure you enter a valid email address (such as abc@company.com) or domain (such as abc.company.com).

5. (optional) Enter a reason. All ASCII printable characters comprised between 32 and 126 are allowed in this field.

6. Use the Submit button to confirm.

Upload a CSV file

To add a group of email addresses or a domains to the suppression list, follow the steps below:

1. Select the Add email or domain button.

2. Choose the Upload CSV option.

   

3. Download the CSV template to use, which includes the columns and format below:

   TYPE,VALUE,COMMENT
   EMAIL,abc@somedomain.com,Comment
   DOMAIN,somedomain.com,Comment
   

4. Fill in the CSV template with the email addresses and/or domains to add to the suppression list. All ASCII printable characters comprised between 32 and 126 are allowed in the COMMENT column.

   CAUTION

   Do not change the name of the columns in the CSV template.

   The file size should not exceed 1 MB.

5. Once completed, drag and drop your CSV file, and use the Submit button to confirm.

   

Once the upload is done, you can check its status from the Recent uploads button, as detailed below.

Check uploads status

Use the Recent uploads button to check the status of the latest uploaded CSV files.

Possible statuses are:

• Pending: The file upload is processing.
• Error: The file upload process failed due to a technical issue or to a file format error.
• Complete: The file upload process was successfully completed.

During the upload, if some addresses are not in the correct format, they are not added to the Journey Optimizer suppression list.

In that case, when the upload is complete, it is associated with a report. You can download it to check the errors encountered.

Below is an example of the type of entries you can find in the error report:

type,value,comments,failureReason
Email,examplemail.com,MANUAL,Invalid format for value: examplemail.com
Email,examplemail,MANUAL,Invalid format for value: examplemail
Email,example@mail,MANUAL,Invalid format for value: example@mail
Domain,example,MANUAL,Invalid format for value: example
Domain,example.!com,MANUAL,Invalid format for value: example.!com
Domain,!examplecom,MANUAL,Invalid format for value: !examplecom

Remove an address from the suppression list

You can update manually the suppression list. Removing an email address from quarantine is a sensitive operation and can affect your IP reputation and deliverability rates. Make sure to proceed with caution.

When deleting an email address or a domain from the suppression list, Adobe Journey Optimizer can start again delivering to this address or domain. Learn more about deliverability in this section.

To remove an address from the suppression list, use the Delete button.

For example in the case of an Internet Service Provider (ISP) outage, emails are wrongly marked as hard bounces because they cannot be successfully delivered to their recipient. These email addresses must be removed from the suppression list.

To retrieve those addresses, run a specific query with custom parameters, based on the context of the outage. Learn more in this sample.

Once the affected email addresses are identified, filter the suppression list to display them. For example if an ISP outage happened from Nov 11, 2022 to Nov 13, 2022 on the test.com domain, filter the addresses added to the suppression list in that timeframe, as below:

You can then remove quarantined email addresses from the suppression list using the Delete button.

Download the suppression list

To export the suppression list as a CSV file, follow the steps below:

1. Select the Download CSV button.

   

2. Wait until the file is generated.

   NOTE

   Download time depends on the file size, meaning the number of addresses that are on the suppression list.

   One download request can be processed at a time for a given sandbox.

3. Once the file is generated, you receive a notification. Click the bell icon on top right of the screen to display it.

4. Click the notification itself to download the file.

   

   NOTE

   The link is valid for 24 hours.