You can manage your accounts' internal blocklist under the Contacts menu > Internal Blocklist.
About internal blocklists
Internal blocklists are used to exclude recipients or domains who should not be contacted via email, either because they have previously complained, or they risk damaging your sender reputation.
For one-off, business critical campaigns, you can ask Emarsys Support to configure an email campaign to ignore the blocklists.
Internal blocklists are not to be confused with the industry blocklists (Domain Name System-based Blackhole Lists, or DNSBLs) used to identify and block spammers.
Emarsys has four types of blocklist.
1. Internal blocklist
As a quick reminder, here is the onboarding video about internal blocklist:
Each Emarsys account has a private internal blocklist where you can add and remove email addresses or domains (see below). Any email address or domain on this list is blocked from receiving any more emails from that account.
Email addresses and domains on an internal blocklist will not receive any emails, even if the campaign is set to ignore opt-in or is a transactional email that ignores opt-in automatically.
These email addresses remain on the list even if the contact is deleted and re-imported.
1.1. Account complaint suppression list
If a contact marks an email from your account as spam or junk (“complains”), the email address is added to the account's complaints blocklist. Changes to this list can only be made by Emarsys Support.
Any email address on this list is blocked from receiving any more marketing emails from that account, and any sub-account associated with it.
The email addresses on this list are the ones that are referenced by the Block complaints from other Emarsys accounts checkbox (see below).
Email addresses on the complaints blocklist will still receive emails that follow the rules for transactional opt-in.
To see which email addresses are on this list, you can make a contact response export of all contacts and select Complaints as the source.
2. The global suppression list
Emarsys also maintains a global suppression blocklist of email addresses which pose a significant risk to your deliverability.
These include known spam traps, notorious complainers, domains known for high complaint rates, and role addresses which cannot be assigned to individual people (such as alert@, abuse@, ftp@).
All email addresses on this list are blocked from receiving any type of email from any Emarsys account.
2.1. National 'Robinson' lists
Some countries and organizations maintain so-called Robinson Lists, which are lists of domains and email addresses which have voluntarily opted out of all email marketing communication.
Emarsys includes only the Austrian Robinson list in its global suppression blocklist, though you can request to have this restriction removed for your account, if you have a valid business reason to send to any of the domains or email addresses on it.
Maintaining your internal blocklist
You can also manually specify additional email addresses or domains which will always be excluded from your mailings.
The Overview tab
The Block complaints from other Emarsys accounts option suppresses recipients who have complained about emails sent from other Emarsys accounts on the same login environment as your account.
This option can help remove “frequent complainers” who can harm your sender reputation.
It can be dangerous to deactivate this option after it has been active, as contacts could potentially start to receive unexpected emails from you, raising the risk of them complaining.
The Email tab
Here you can add email addresses to your blocklist, both individually or via batch imports. You also have the option to export your blocklisted entries so that you can import them to another sub-domain and exclude them there as well.
The table displays all blocklisted entries with their email address, the name of the administrator who added them and the date they were added. Clicking any column header sorts the entries in ascending or descending order, based on the column you chose (e.g. email address, administrator, date added).
- To add a particular email address to your Internal Blocklist, enter it in the field at the top left and click Add Email.
- If you have a list with many addresses to add to the Internal Blocklist, you can upload it. Lists can be either .txt or .csv format and make sure the email addresses are in the first column. Important: If the addresses are not in the first column, then the import will not add any of them to the blocklist.
- You can export your blocklisted entries by clicking the Export button, and then entering the desired email address to send the content in the prompt.
- If you want to remove a single entry, check the box next to it and then click Delete. To remove all entries on the page click Select all and then Delete. To remove all email addresses from the blocklist, click Empty Blocklist.
- Click Search to look for an individual email address (you can search for partial email addresses).
The Domain tab
Here you can exclude entire domains from receiving your emails by adding them to the blocklist.
The table displays all blocklisted domain entries, the name of the administrator who added them and the date they were added. Clicking any column header sorts the entries in ascending or descending order, based on the column you chose (e.g. domain, administrator, date added).
- To add a domain to your Internal Blocklist, enter it in the field at the top left and click Add Domain.
- If you have a list with many domains to add to the Internal Blocklist, you can upload it. Lists can be either .TXT or .CSV format and make sure the domain names are in the first column.
Important: If domain names are not in the first column, then the import will not add any of them to the blocklist.
You must also omit the @ sign, i.e. just enter example.com. If you include the @, the domain name will not be recognized and will continue to receive emails.
- If you want to remove a single entry, check the box next to it and then click Delete. To remove all entries on the page click Select all and then Delete. To remove all domains in your blocklist, click Empty Blocklist.
- Click Search to look for an individual domain (you do not need to enter the full name).
