Contact Management Options

The Admin role in your account has the following advanced contact management permissions:

Adding emails to the local blacklist.
Removing emails from the local blacklist.
Adding phone numbers to the local blacklist.
Removing phone numbers from the local blacklist.
Unsubscribing emails and editing contact subscription categories (also available for the Marketer role).

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Note
Contact our Support Service if you need to manage other functions that aren't available for the Admin role.

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Note
The actions below manage your account's local blacklist only — they don't affect other accounts. Reteno also maintains a system blacklist (automatic: non-existent, full, or inactive addresses, and spam traps) that is shared across the whole system and managed only by Reteno support. See Contact Blacklist for the difference between the two.

Adding Emails to the Local Blacklist

To add emails to the local blacklist:

Go to Contacts → All contacts.

Select the Add email to blacklist icon beside a contact.

In the popup window, click Done.

The email address of a contact added to the local blacklist shows crossed out in the list, and the Add email to blacklist icon for that contact is replaced with the Exclude email from blacklist icon.

Removing Emails from the Local Blacklist

To remove emails from the local blacklist:

Go to Contacts → All contacts and select Blacklisted in the Email section of the left-hand menu.

Select the Exclude email from blacklist icon beside a contact.

In the popup window, click Done.

The email address of a contact removed from the local blacklist disappears from the list of blacklisted emails, and the Exclude email from blacklist icon for that contact is replaced with the Add email to blacklist icon.

Adding Phone Numbers to the Local Blacklist

To add phone numbers to the local blacklist:

Go to Contacts → All contacts.

Select the Add phone number to blacklist icon beside a contact.

In the popup window, click Add.

The phone number of a contact added to the local blacklist shows crossed out in the list, and the Add phone to blacklist icon for that contact is replaced with the Exclude phone from blacklist icon.

Removing Phone Numbers from the Local Blacklist

To remove phone numbers from the local blacklist:

Go to Contacts → All contacts and select Blacklisted in the Phone number section in the left-hand menu.

Select the Exclude phone from blacklist icon beside a contact.

The phone number of a contact removed from the local blacklist disappears from the list of blacklisted phones, and the Exclude phone from blacklist icon for that contact is replaced with the Add phone to blacklist icon.

More about contact blacklist >

Unsubscribing Emails

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Important
The Admin role permissions allow you only to unsubscribe email addresses. You can't add them back to a subscription category manually. To subscribe again, the contact has to fill in your subscription form themselves and confirm the subscription through double opt-in. An unsubscribed address doesn't receive emails, except those sent by transactional blocks in a workflow. If an address was unsubscribed by mistake, you can return it with the Remove emails from unsubscribed list API resource.

To unsubscribe emails:

Go to Contacts → All contacts.

Select the Unsubscribe contact's email icon beside a contact.

In the popup window, click Unsubscribe.

The email address of a contact removed from the subscription category shows in red in the list, and the Unsubscribe contact's email icon for that contact disappears.

Information about which user unsubscribed the contact is displayed on the Contact information tab.

Unsubscribe and blacklist actions apply to the email address, not to a specific contact. If several contacts in your account share the same address — for example, when one account serves several products — unsubscribing or blacklisting one of them affects all of them.

To unsubscribe many addresses at once, pass them with the Add emails to unsubscribed list API resource, or upload the contacts to a separate segment and ask support to unsubscribe that segment.

Editing Contact Subscription Categories

Editing a contact's subscription category allows only removing the contact from a category. Read the Subscription Categories article to learn about adding a contact to a subscription category.

To edit subscription categories for a contact:

Go to Contacts → All contacts.

Select the Edit contact subscription icon beside a contact.

In the popup window, clear the box beside the category name you want to remove for the contact, then click Done.

Deleting Contacts

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Note
Contacts are not deleted from the account automatically. This also applies to unsubscribed contacts: they remain in the base and count toward its size until you delete them manually, with the Delete contact workflow block, or via the Delete contact API method.

To delete a contact:

Go to Contacts → All contacts.

Click the Delete contact icon beside a contact.

Specify the delete reason (optional) and click Delete.

When a contact is deleted, the active workflow runs linked to it stop.

Contacts with a Device ID

The Device ID identifies the contact's mobile profile, and the push token belongs to that profile: once the user is identified, the two are merged into the contact. Don't remove the Device ID from a contact that already has a mobile push token — mobile identification and token handling break. Contacts that have a Device ID but no push token can be deleted; if such a contact allows notifications later, it is restored from the deleted contacts with both the Device ID and the push token. The app can't stop sending the Device ID.

When a Deleted Contact Comes Back

Deleting a contact doesn't erase their data for good. A deleted contact's message history is kept: you can see it in the contact card — deleted contacts open from the Deleted list on the All contacts tab — and a restored contact comes back with this history. If a message is later sent to that contact's email address or phone number — an OTP code over the API, for example — the contact is restored. When several deleted contacts share that address or number, the oldest of them is restored, the one with the lowest ID, so a duplicate you have just cleaned up can reappear in the base. If an active contact with the same address or number exists, the message goes to them and no deleted contact is restored.

The mobile SDK doesn't send user data that hasn't changed since the last transfer, so sending the same attributes from the app again doesn't restore a deleted contact. Restore it via the API: call Add/update contacts with "restoreDeleted": true.

Deleting Contacts in Bulk

Several routes remove a group of contacts at once, depending on how the group is defined.

A segment you already have. Delete the segment with the option that removes its contacts too — see Segment Management Options.
A cell of the RFM table. Use Delete contacts for the selected cell — see RFM Analysis.
A rule that keeps applying. Run a workflow with the Delete contact block over a dynamic segment, started regularly for that segment, so contacts that match the conditions later are deleted too. The full setup is in Delete Inactive Contacts Automatically.

Segment conditions include the contact creation date, so this is also how you remove contacts registered before or after a given date.

If you prefer to delete contacts with Delete contact from the API, you need their IDs. The Search contacts resource has no parameter for the creation date, so take the IDs from the BigQuery export instead: the contacts table holds both contactId and createdDate.