Suppression & unsubscribe

Suppression is how Send & Retain protects a project's sending reputation. Every send checks the suppression list; suppressed recipients are skipped (and the attempt is still logged).

Reasons and what they block

Transactional email — receipts, password resets — still delivers to unsubscribed contacts. It's blocked only by bounce, complaint, or manual.

Global vs. topic-scoped

Every suppression is scoped: global (the whole project) or to a single subscription topic.

• bounce, complaint and manual are always global — they're a deliverability signal, not a preference, so they block every stream.
• unsubscribe can be either. A global unsubscribe blocks all lifecycle email; a topic-scoped one blocks only lifecycle sends of that topic.

A lifecycle send of topic T is blocked by a global unsubscribe or a topic-T unsubscribe. If a project has defined no topics, every unsubscribe is global — the simple behavior.

Severity ladder

Reasons have a severity order:

complaint > bounce > manual > unsubscribe

A stronger reason is never downgraded by a weaker one — if a complaint already suppressed an address, a later unsubscribe won't loosen it.

Automatic suppression

Bounce and complaint webhooks suppress automatically, so you can't keep mailing an address that bounced or reported spam. Complaint suppressions are permanent.

Hosted unsubscribe

Lifecycle emails carry RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe headers plus a footer link, both pointing at a hosted page Send & Retain owns. One-click adds an unsubscribe suppression scoped to the topic of the message it was clicked from, so leaving one stream doesn't cancel the others.

When a project has topics defined, that page is a full preference center — per-topic toggles plus an unsubscribe-from-everything option. Resubscribe removes only an unsubscribe-reason suppression; it can never clear a bounce or complaint.