Properly managing your contacts is essential for maintaining good deliverability, ensuring compliance, and maximizing the effectiveness of your email marketing. This guide covers how to handle bounces, manage suppression lists, and maintain contact data in Brew.

For proactive strategies to keep your audience clean and engaged over time, see our Audience Hygiene guide.

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Contact Activity Timeline

The contact activity timeline provides a chronological view of all interactions and events for a specific contact. This powerful feature helps you understand each contact’s journey and engagement with your emails.

To access the contact activity timeline:

  1. Go to the Audience page
  2. Click on any contact’s email address
  3. View the complete history in the timeline section

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What’s Tracked in the Timeline

The timeline displays a comprehensive record of contact activity:

The timeline makes it easy to see the full context of a contact’s interactions with your business, helping you provide more personalized communication and troubleshoot any issues.

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Understanding Email Bounces

An email bounce occurs when your message cannot be delivered to the recipient’s inbox. Bounces are important signals about your contact data quality and can affect your sender reputation if not properly managed.

Brew automatically handles bounce management to protect your sender reputation, but understanding the different types can help you maintain a healthier audience.

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Types of Bounces

Brew categorizes bounces into two main types:

Hard Bounces

Permanent delivery failures that won’t be resolved with retries

Soft Bounces

Temporary delivery issues that may resolve over time

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Hard Bounces

Hard bounces indicate permanent delivery failures that won’t be resolved with additional sending attempts.

Common causes of hard bounces:

  • Email address contains a typo (e.g., example@gmial.com)
  • Email address doesn’t exist (perhaps the person left the company)
  • Email server has permanently blocked delivery
  • Domain no longer exists

How Brew handles hard bounces:

  1. Automatically identifies the bounce based on server response codes
  2. Records the specific bounce reason in your campaign analytics
  3. Adds the email address to your suppression list
  4. Prevents future sending attempts to protect your deliverability

A hard bounce rate above 3% (30 bounces per 1,000 emails) can trigger temporary sending restrictions to protect your sender reputation.

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Soft Bounces

Soft bounces are temporary delivery failures that may resolve with time or additional attempts.

Common causes of soft bounces:

  • Recipient’s mailbox is full
  • Email server is temporarily down or unavailable
  • Message is too large
  • Recipient’s auto-responder is active

How Brew handles soft bounces:

  1. Automatically retries delivery based on industry best practices
  2. Tracks the bounce reason and attempts in your analytics
  3. Only counts unique soft bounces in your metrics (not each retry)
  4. Converts to a hard bounce after multiple failed attempts (typically 3-5 days of trying)

Soft bounces typically resolve on their own and don’t require immediate action. However, persistently high soft bounce rates (above 5%) may indicate underlying issues with your sending practices.

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Viewing Bounce Details

To see detailed information about email bounces:

1

Find the bounced email

  1. Go to the Emails page
  2. Use the search or filters to locate emails with bounce status
  3. Click on the recipient’s email address
2

View bounce details

In the email details panel:

  1. Hover over the “Bounced” status indicator
  2. Click “See Details” for complete information

This will show:

  • Bounce type (hard or soft)
  • Specific bounce reason
  • Timestamp of the bounce
  • Recommended actions (if applicable)

Quick method: You can also search directly for a specific email address on the Emails page to quickly find all sending attempts and their status, including any bounce information.

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Managing the Suppression List

The suppression list is an automatically maintained list of email addresses that are blocked from receiving your emails. This list helps protect your sender reputation and ensures compliance with email regulations.

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Why Emails Land on the Suppression List

Email addresses are added to the suppression list for several reasons:

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Viewing the Suppression List

To access your suppression list:

  1. Go to the Audience page
  2. Click the filter icon at the top of the table
  3. Select “Suppressed contacts” from the dropdown
  4. (Optional) Filter further by suppression reason (hard bounce, spam complaint, unsubscribe)

Each suppressed contact will show the specific reason they were added to the list and when the suppression occurred.

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Removing an Address from the Suppression List

In some cases, you may want to remove an email address from the suppression list—for example, if you’ve confirmed a typo has been fixed or a temporary issue has been resolved.

For compliance reasons, you cannot remove addresses that were suppressed due to spam complaints or unsubscribes. Only bounced email addresses can be removed from the suppression list.

Important: Before removing any address from the suppression list, make sure you’ve addressed the underlying issue that caused the bounce. If the issue hasn’t been resolved, the email will bounce again when you attempt to send to it, and it will be automatically added back to the suppression list.

To remove a hard-bounced address from the suppression list:

1

Find the suppressed contact

  1. Go to the Audience page
  2. Filter for suppressed contacts with hard bounces
  3. Locate the specific contact you want to unsuppress

Alternative method:

  1. Go to the Emails page
  2. Search for the specific email address
  3. Click on any email with a “Bounced” status
2

Verify the bounce reason

Before removing a contact from the suppression list:

  1. Check the specific bounce reason
  2. Confirm the issue has been resolved (e.g., corrected typo, confirmed valid address)

If you remove an address that still has delivery issues, it will bounce again and return to the suppression list.

3

Remove from suppression list

  1. Click on the contact to open their profile
  2. In the contact details panel, look for the “Suppressed” status
  3. Click “Remove from Suppression List”
  4. Confirm the action

The contact will immediately be eligible to receive emails again.

If you’re unsure whether an address should be removed from the suppression list, it’s generally safer to keep it suppressed or verify the address through other means first.

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Contact Management Tasks

This section covers common operational tasks for managing your contacts database.

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Updating Contact Properties

To update properties for individual contacts:

1

Access contact details

  1. Go to the Audience page
  2. Click on the contact you want to modify
2

Edit properties

  1. In the contact profile, click the pencil icon next to any property
  2. Make your changes
  3. Click “Save” to update the property

You can edit multiple properties before saving changes.

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Bulk Contact Updates

For updating multiple contacts simultaneously:

1

Create or select an audience

  1. Go to the Audience page
  2. Use filters or the AI prompt to select the contacts you want to update
  3. Save as an audience or proceed with the current selection
2

Apply bulk updates

  1. Click the “More” (⋮) menu at the top of the contacts table
  2. Select “Bulk update properties”
  3. Choose the property to update and the new value
  4. Confirm the change

Bulk updates cannot be undone, so review your selection carefully before confirming.

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Deleting Contacts

To permanently remove contacts from your database:

1

Find the contact(s)

  1. Go to the Audience page
  2. Search for the specific contact or filter to select multiple contacts
2

Delete the contact(s)

For a single contact:

  1. Click on the contact to open their profile
  2. Click the “More” (⋮) menu in the profile
  3. Select “Delete contact”
  4. Confirm the deletion

For multiple contacts:

  1. Select the contacts using the checkboxes
  2. Click the “More” (⋮) menu at the top of the table
  3. Select “Delete contacts”
  4. Confirm the deletion

Contact deletion is permanent and cannot be undone. Deleted contacts will be removed from all subscription groups and automations. This action is different from unsubscribing or suppressing contacts.

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Advanced Contact Management via API

For programmatic contact management, Brew offers a comprehensive Contacts API that allows you to:

  • Create and update contacts with custom properties
  • Add contacts to specific subscription groups
  • Manage contact suppressions
  • Track custom events for contacts
curl -X POST "https://api.getbrew.ai/v1/contacts/create" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "email": "jane@example.com",
    "firstName": "Jane",
    "lastName": "Smith",
    "subscriptionGroups": {
      "sg_newsletter": true,
      "sg_product_updates": true
    },
    "companyName": "Acme Corp",
    "planType": "Enterprise"
  }'

For complete API documentation, visit the Contacts API Reference.

Learn about Audience Hygiene

Discover strategic approaches for maintaining a clean, engaged email list

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