# Email suppressions (/guides/suppressions)

A **suppression** is a hard "do not send to this address" for email — independent of a contact's subscription. Suppressions catch the cases a per-contact toggle can't: an address that hard-bounced, a spam complaint, or an address you were told never to email again. Manage them in **Settings › Data › Email suppressions**.

## What a suppression does

At send time, a **marketing** email to a suppressed address is skipped. **Transactional** email is not affected — a suppression must never break a password reset or a receipt.

Suppressions are scoped:

| Scope       | Applies to                                                                           |
| ----------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| **Project** | The address, within this project. The usual case.                                    |
| **Topic**   | The address, for one topic in this project.                                          |
| **Global**  | The address, across every project (a platform-level kill list — e.g. a hard bounce). |

## Automatic suppression

You don't have to maintain the list by hand for the common cases:

* A **bounce** adds a project suppression for that address (origin `BOUNCE`).
* A **complaint** (marked as spam) adds one too (origin `COMPLAINT`).

Both also unsubscribe the contact and write a row to their [consent history](/docs/guides/preference-center#consent-history), so the "why" is always on record.

## Adding and removing

In **Settings › Data › Email suppressions**, paste an address and an optional reason to suppress it, or remove one from the table. The table shows the address, where it came from (origin), and when it was added.

<Callout type="warn">
  Suppressing an address stops **all** marketing email to it in this project — more than a single unsubscribe. Use it for addresses that should never be contacted again; use the preference center for ordinary opt-outs.
</Callout>

## Related

* [Topics & the preference center](/docs/guides/preference-center)
* [List hygiene](/docs/guides/list-hygiene)