Recipient lists and the suppression list

From your selection to the final list

When you send to Donors, an Upload List, or Manual Entry addresses in the Email Studio, Pledgix cleans the list before anything is sent:

1. Validation — addresses that aren't properly formed are skipped. When you upload a spreadsheet, the audience panel shows the counts up front: Valid Emails and Skipped.
2. Deduplication — if the same address appears more than once (say, a donor who gave twice, or a duplicate spreadsheet row), it receives the email only once.
3. Suppression check — addresses on the do-not-send list are quietly removed.

Campaign Teams blasts go to your roster's team-leader addresses — and they're screened against the suppression list too. A suppressed address is skipped, and a team whose every address is suppressed shows up in the failed list with an explicit reason ("All email addresses are on the suppression list") rather than silently "sending". Team emails don't carry an unsubscribe link themselves, so requests from team leaders to stop receiving campaign email are still yours to honor directly.

The confirmation you see after sending reflects this: "Queued 240 emails · 3 suppressed" means 3 addresses were withheld because they're on the suppression list; team-blast summaries report a suppressed count the same way.

What is the suppression list?

The suppression list is a platform-wide record of addresses that must not receive marketing email. Addresses land on it in a few ways:

• Unsubscribes — blasts to Donors, Upload List, and Manual Entry audiences include the one-click unsubscribe that Gmail and other providers surface at the top of the message. One click and the address is out, immediately and automatically.
• Bounces — addresses that permanently fail (mailbox doesn't exist, domain is dead) are suppressed so we stop trying.
• Spam complaints — when a recipient marks a message as spam, they're suppressed.
• Manual additions — the Pledgix team can add an address on request.

Suppression is not per-campaign — once someone unsubscribes from marketing email, no campaign's blast will reach them, whether it targets donors, an uploaded list, manual entries, or your campaign teams. This is both a legal requirement and the single most important protection for everyone's deliverability.

Tip: Suppression applies to marketing email. Transactional messages such as donation receipts are separate and continue to work normally.

Why you can't override it

It might be tempting to re-add an unsubscribed donor "just this once," but repeated mail to unsubscribed or bouncing addresses is the fastest way to get future emails — yours and every other campaign's — filtered to spam. Pledgix enforces the list automatically at queue time so there's nothing to configure and nothing to accidentally get wrong.

If a supporter tells you they unsubscribed by mistake and want back in, contact the Pledgix team with the address and we can review the request.

Keeping your own lists healthy

• Upload fresh spreadsheets rather than reusing year-old files — stale lists bounce more.
• Make sure your spreadsheet has a clear "Email" column header; that's how the uploader finds the addresses.
• Watch the Skipped count on upload. A high number usually means a formatting problem in the file (extra spaces, merged cells, or addresses split across columns).
• Remove obvious role addresses (like info@ or office@) when you want personal engagement — they often route to shared inboxes.

Related articles

• Why an email may not arrive
• Uploading recipient lists from Excel or CSV
• Sending an email blast