How suppression works
Understanding how suppressions work in Bird is essential for maintaining compliance, protecting your sender reputation, and respecting customer preferences. This guide explains everything you need to know about Bird's suppression system.
What Are Suppressions?
Suppressions in Bird are compliance blocks that prevent you from sending messages to specific phone numbers or email addresses. They serve as a protective mechanism that helps businesses stay compliant with regulations like GDPR and CAN-SPAM while respecting customer communication preferences.
How Suppressions Work
Phone/Email Suppression vs Contact-Level: One of the most important aspects of Bird's suppression system is that it operates at the email address or phone number level rather than the contact level.
This means a single contact can have different suppressions across various email addresses or phone numbers. For example, a contact might be suppressed for SMS for one of their phone numbers but their other phone number may not be suppressed. Additionally, if you use communication attributes and have same phone number across 2 different contacts, the phone number will be suppressed for both contacts. Even if contact is deleted and created again with same phone number, the suppression on the phone number is not changed.
Note that this is unlike subscription attributes (Email Subscription, SMS Subscription, WhatsApp Subscription etc.) which are on a contact level.
Marketing vs Transactional: Suppressions are for 2 use cases - Marketing suppression vs Transactional suppression.
Suppressed for Marketing: This means that the phone number or email address can no longer be sent any messages for marketing use case i.e.
from campaigns
from journeys
from flows with use case set as marketing in the send message step
Suppressed for Transactional: This means that the phone number or email address can no longer be sent any messages for transactional use case i.e.
from flows with use case set as transactional in the send message step
from APIs
Platform-based Suppression: Suppressions are supported for only Email, SMS, WhatsApp and Google RCS platforms in Bird. When an email address or phone number is suppressed, it is suppressed for all channels in the workspace for a specific platform (there is an exception for transactional SMS where it is sender-based)
Email is suppressed for Platform = Email: Suppressed from receiving email from any domains (email channels) in the workspace
Phone Number is suppressed for Platform = SMS: Suppressed from receiving SMS from any senders (SMS channels) in the workspace
Exception: When the suppression is of Use Case = Transactional, the phone number is only suppressed from receiving messages from a specific sender (SMS channel)
Phone Number is suppressed for Platform = WhatsApp: Suppressed from receiving WhatsApp message from any WhatsApp accounts (WhatsApp channels) in the workspace
Phone Number is suppressed for Platform = RCS: Suppressed from receiving Google RCS message from any RCS channels in the workspace
Channel setting to Ignore suppressions
Note that for each channel there is a separate setting Manage Suppressions toggle which can allow sending messages by ignoring all suppressions. This is mostly used if you want to send transactional or operational messages from Marketing features like Campaigns and Journeys.
Note that in this case, you must manually remove the unsubscribed and suppressed contacts as they will not be skipped automatically due to suppression.
To access the channel settings, follow these steps:
Go to Settings > Connectivity > Channels
Select a platform like Email, SMS, WhatsApp etc.
Click your channel row to open your channel overview page
Go to the gear icon on top right and click to open Channel configuration
The Channel Configuration page will open up where you can view the toggle for Manage Suppressions
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