Overview
Suppression Updates helps maintain your global email subscription list. You can use this feature to ensure that users who should not be contacted are restricted from receiving emails. This is essential for maintaining compliance and protecting your sender reputation.
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Information If you use MoEngage Managed Email, reachability updates are automatically propagated to SendGrid. However, if you integrate your own SendGrid account, this automatic sync is not supported; you must manage suppression updates directly within your SendGrid dashboard. |
Use Cases
- Migrate from legacy email marketing platforms or ESPs: Bulk import historical suppression lists (bounces/unsubscribes/spams) when moving to MoEngage to protect your sender reputation from day one.
- Automate SendGrid sync: Automatically propagate suppression updates to SendGrid to keep your non-transactional senders compliant without manual work. This applies only if you select SendGrid Tracking in Unsubscribe Settings while configuring an email sender in MoEngage.
- Protect critical emails: Maintain a global suppression list for marketing campaigns without blocking essential transactional alerts, such as one-time passwords (OTPs) or password resets.
- Manage suppression requests independently: Unsubscribe or resubscribe users in self-service enabled workspaces, eliminating the need to raise support tickets for individual status updates.
Bulk Import of Users
A primary function of Suppression Updates is to import existing subscription lists in bulk. This is a critical step during email onboarding, especially when migrating from a previous email marketing platform or ESP.
Use this feature to upload CSV lists of users who have previously:
- Experienced email bounces.
- Unsubscribed from your communications.
- Marked your emails as spam (complained).
CSV File Requirements
To ensure your subscription list is imported correctly, your CSV file must follow these requirements:
- The CSV file must strictly follow the column sequence listed below. While column headers are case-insensitive, the sequence must not be altered to ensure successful processing.
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Identifier column: Label this column Email ID, MoEngage ID, or Email ID/MoEngage ID. Note that if PII tokenization is enabled for your workspace, you must label this column ID.
- Unsubscribe
- Bounce
- Spam
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- For each user, the CSV should specify true or false (case-insensitive) for the columns: Unsubscribe, Bounce, and Spam. For example, a user who unsubscribed but never bounced or marked the email as spam would have the following values:
- Unsubscribe: true
- Bounce: false
- Spam: false
- Your CSV file must not contain duplicate email entries. If duplicates are found, MoEngage processes only the last entry in the file and skips all preceding duplicates.
- A user is considered resubscribed only when MoEngage updates their status from true (suppressed) to false (active) for all three suppression categories. If the user's current status for all three entries is already false, no update is performed.
- A user becomes reachable if all three suppression categories are set to false, and the user is suppressed if any of the three categories is set to true.
- You can use the same CSV file to unsubscribe or resubscribe a user, depending on the value specified in the Unsubscribe column. To make a previously unsubscribed user reachable, upload a file with the Unsubscribe value set to false. If Bounce and Complaint are also false, the user is eligible to receive emails again.
- MoEngage generates the following events when the status of BUC attributes (Bounce, Unsubscribe, or Complaint) changes:
BUC attributes Status Change Generated Event Name Bounce False to True Email Bounced True to False Email Bounce Reset Unsubscribe False to True Email Unsubscribed True to False Email Resubscribed Complaint False to True Email Complained True to False Email Complain Reset
Upload the Subscription Update File
- If self-serve for email onboarding is enabled for your workspace, you can manage the suppression as described here.
- If self-serve for email onboarding is not enabled for your workspace, you can manage the suppression as described here.
FUP Limits
To maintain system stability and prevent excessive load on the Suppression Management service, the following constraints are enforced at the workspace level:
- File size limit: Uploads are strictly limited to 75 MB per file.
- Duplicate file name validation: To avoid redundant processing, MoEngage checks for existing filenames. If a file with the same name has already been processed, the upload request is rejected.
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Limit upload frequency: To ensure equitable resource availability, file uploads are subject to the following frequency limits:
Time Window Maximum Allowed Uploads 5 Minutes 5 uploads 15 Minutes 10 uploads 1 Hour 20 uploads 24 Hours 50 uploads
FAQs
When moving to MoEngage from a previous ESP, you must use the Bulk Import feature within Subscription Management. You will export your existing suppression list (users who bounced, unsubscribed, or complained) from your old provider and upload it to MoEngage as a CSV file. This ensures that MoEngage respects your historical data and permanently restricts these users from receiving emails, protecting your reputation from day one.
Importing your list is essential for maintaining compliance (honoring previous opt-outs) and protecting your sender reputation. Sending emails to users who have previously bounced or marked you as spam can severely damage your deliverability and cause ISPs to block your future emails.
No. Subscription Management is designed for permanent restrictions (like legal opt-outs or hard bounces). If you want to temporarily exclude a group (e.g., "Unengaged Users"), you should create a specific Segment (Suppression List) and exclude it during campaign creation, rather than altering their global BUC status.
If a campaign is tagged as a "transactional" type or an inform alert is sent, the suppression list ignores the unsub/complaint flag. However, if a user is marked as bounced, the email is not sent.
Yes. You can make a user reachable again by setting their attribute values to false. A user is considered "suppressed" if any of these are set to true.
To resubscribe, upload a CSV where the Bounce, Unsubscribe, and Complaint columns are all set to false for that user.
If a cell is left empty, MoEngage makes no change to that specific attribute for that user. The attribute will simply retain whatever value currently exists in the user's profile.
MoEngage identifies users by matching the email addresses in your CSV file against the user attribute configured in your Email General Settings.
Specifically, MoEngage looks at the attribute defined in the User attribute that stores the email address field and compares every email ID in your uploaded CSV against this attribute across your user base. Any user profile containing a matching email address in that attribute will be updated.
If the "Unsubscribe based on email ID" capability is set, all user profiles associated with that email address will be unsubscribed or resubscribed accordingly.
To ensure complete traceability, all modifications are automatically recorded in your Audit Logs.