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Concepts

Suppression list

The suppression list is a per-tenant blocklist of recipient addresses. Nudgel checks it before every send and skips suppressed recipients without making a provider call.

What is the suppression list

The suppression list is a table of email addresses (or phone numbers for SMS) that should never receive messages from your tenant. Before Nudgel dispatches any message, it checks whether the recipient is on this list. If they are:

  • The message is recorded with status=suppressed
  • No provider call is made
  • No cost is incurred
  • The suppression reason is stored on the message row

Why it matters

Sending to suppressed addresses has real consequences for your deliverability reputation:

  • Hard bounce addresses do not exist or permanently reject mail. Repeatedly hitting them signals to providers that your list hygiene is poor.
  • Spam complainants explicitly told their email provider your mail is spam. Continuing to send to them multiplies your complaint rate and can trigger blacklisting.
  • Unsubscribers — in Kenya (KICA), Europe (GDPR), and the US (CAN-SPAM), you are legally required to honour unsubscribe requests for marketing email.

DO NOT BYPASS SUPPRESSIONS

The suppression check happens at the Nudgel layer — before your provider is called. Do not manually remove addresses from the suppression list unless you have verified the address is valid and the person has explicitly re-opted in. Removing hard bounce suppressions and re-sending to those addresses will damage your sender reputation.

Auto-population

The following events automatically add addresses to the suppression list when Nudgel receives the corresponding webhook from your email provider:

Webhook eventSuppression reason
Hard bouncehard_bounce
Spam complaintspam_complaint
Unsubscribeunsubscribed

Soft bounces (temporary failures) do not automatically add to the suppression list unless the failure rate for that address exceeds a threshold over time.

Auto-population requires webhooks to be configured. If you have not set up webhooks for your email provider, Nudgel will not receive these events. See the webhooks guide.

Scope and isolation

The suppression list is strictly per-tenant. An address suppressed in tenant A is not suppressed in tenant B — each tenant manages its own list independently. This is consistent with Nudgel's overall tenant isolation model.

Managing suppressions

See the suppressions setup guide for step-by-step instructions on viewing, filtering, manually adding, and removing suppression entries.

For API access: