Email suppression is a system that prevents email surveys from being sent to specific addresses or domains. It protects your sender reputation, keeps your deliverability rates healthy, and ensures you don't send surveys to addresses that have been blocked.

Some email addresses should never receive surveys. Sending to them wastes credits, hurts your sender reputation, and can result in spam complaints.

Common examples include:

Suppression handles all of these cases automatically, so you don't have to manage them manually.

Retently maintains a global suppression list of domains and email addresses that are blocked across all accounts on the platform. You cannot modify this list, and it requires no action on your part.

For privacy reasons, email addresses on the global list are displayed in masked form (e.g., j***@g***.com). This ensures that addresses reported as spam complaints on other accounts are not exposed to you.

In addition to the global list, you can maintain your own suppression list at the account level. This is useful when you know certain addresses or domains should not receive surveys from your account specifically.

Account-level suppressions are private to your account; they have no effect on other Retently accounts.

Go to Settings → Suppressions. The page has two tabs:

Shows all suppressed email addresses visible to your account, including:

To add an email address:

To remove an account-level email suppression, click Remove next to the entry. Global entries cannot be removed.

Works the same way for domains. You can suppress an entire domain so that no contacts with that domain receive email surveys from your account.

To add a domain:

Wildcard patterns are supported. For example, *.internal.company.com will block all subdomains of internal.company.com.

Email addresses in the suppression list are shown in a masked format, for example j***@g***.com. This applies to both global and account-level entries. The masking protects privacy in cases where suppressed addresses originated from spam complaints or other sensitive sources.

Because the list is masked, you cannot visually scan it for a specific address. Instead, use the Check Email field at the top of the Suppressed Emails tab:

If the address is account-scoped and was added manually, a Remove button will appear directly in the result so you can unsuppress it immediately.

Retently normalizes email addresses before storing or checking them. Specifically:

This means:

This normalization ensures that address variations cannot be used to bypass a suppression. It applies to all domains, not just Gmail.

For privacy and GDPR compliance, suppressed email addresses are not stored in plaintext in Retently’s database. Instead, each address is converted to a one-way cryptographic hash before being saved. The original email address cannot be recovered from the stored hash.

This means:

When a contact submits a right-to-erasure (GDPR deletion) request, you may need to delete their contact record from Retently — but you also want to make sure they are never contacted again in the future.

The recommended approach is:

This satisfies both requirements: the personal data is gone, and the address is protected from future sends.

These two mechanisms look similar but serve different purposes:

In short: use unsubscribe when a contact opts out by choice; use suppression when the address must never receive surveys regardless of how the contact is created.

When a new contact is added — manually, via CSV import, through the API, or via an integration — Retently automatically checks whether their email matches any suppression rule. If it does, the contact is marked as Suppressed immediately.

Suppressed contacts show a Suppressed label. You can filter your contact list by suppression status using the Customer Status → Suppressed filter.

If you attempt to manually send a survey to a suppressed contact, you will see a warning: “This contact is suppressed. Their email domain or address has been blocked from receiving surveys.”

No survey will be queued and no credits will be consumed.

For campaign (automated) sends, suppressed contacts are excluded before the campaign worker processes the audience, so they are simply skipped.

If a contact was suppressed after a survey was already queued, the outbox entry will show a Suppressed status (gray icon). In this case, no email was delivered.

The Deliverability page (available under Analytics) shows a month-by-month breakdown of email events including bounces, spam complaints, unsubscribes, and suppressions.

The Suppressions column counts the number of times a survey send was blocked at send time because the recipient’s email address or domain was on the suppression list. Each suppressed send attempt is recorded as a single event.

This is a send-time count, not an import-time count. It tells you how many actual delivery attempts were intercepted by suppression — not how many of your contacts happen to have a suppressed address.

For example: if you have 50 contacts with suppressed email addresses but none of them are targeted by a campaign this month, the counter stays at zero. The number only increases when a send is actively attempted and blocked.