Suppressions

Protect your sender reputation, maximize deliverability, and ensure compliance with legal requirements.

A suppression is a block that stops you from sending messages to a specific phone number or email address. The most common way this happens is when someone unsubscribes. Learn more about unsubscribes.

How suppression works

Suppression is a compliance block that Bird places to prevent you from sending messages to a specific number or email address.

Suppression works on an identifier level (email or phone number), not a contact level.

Important

• Unsubscribing from Email and SMS channels automatically creates a suppression

• An SMS suppression can only be removed if the contact re-subscribes using keywords. For example, if they have unsubscribed from receiving SMS messages, they can re-subscribe by texting "START", or another opt-in key word.

• You cannot remove a suppression by uninstalling and reinstalling a channel or deleting and recreating a contact

• Changing a contact's subscription status back to "Subscribed" does not automatically remove them from the suppression list. They must be unsuppressed separately because suppressions can exist for reasons other than unsubscribing (like invalid emails or hard bounces).

Suppression methods

There are many ways that an identifier can be suppressed and added to the suppression list:

• Customer unsubscribes: A customer clicks an unsubscribe link in an email or SMS.

• Customer explicitly opts-out: A customer sends “STOP” or any other opt-out keyword via SMS.

• Manual addition: You manually add the contact identifier to the suppression list.

• Invalid Email / Hard bounce: Emails sent to the address hard bounce, indicating that emails can never be delivered to that address.

Suppression enforcement

Suppressions are enforced at platform level (SMS, WhatsApp, Email or RCS.) except for SMS Transactional suppression which is on the SMS channel/sender level.

There are different types of suppressions, and before sending a message, the contact identifier will be checked against all of these. If the identifier matches any suppression, it won't be sent.

Types of suppression:

• Global suppression: Bird CRM maintains a Global Suppression List (GSL) for Email that is applied across all mail streams. The GSL contains many common misspelled domains as well as role addresses.

• Identifier-level suppressions: Suppression stops messages from being sent to a specific contact detail (like a phone number or email address) for a certain type of message (like Marketing or Transactional). These blocks can happen automatically (like when an email bounces back) or can be added manually.

• Contact-level unsubscriptions: Contacts are individuals who might have multiple contact details, like several phone numbers. When someone unsubscribes, it is tracked for the entire contact. If they unsubscribe from SMS messages, none of their current or future phone numbers will receive promotional messages for that service.

Reminders

• Contact-level unsubscriptions are always triggered when a user clicks on an unsubscription link or sends an opt-out keyword.

• Contact-level unsubscriptions only affect promotional traffic.

The suppression list

You can find a list of all suppressed contact identifiers by making sure you are in the Marketing section of your workspace, and selecting Suppressions from the side bar.

Here you will find a record of every number or email address that has been suppressed, and any corresponding contact information.