Suppressions
Respect the recipient. Protect your sending.
Hard bounces and complaints create recipient suppressions. Unsubscribes record preferences separately. Bird checks these records when processing a send, so your team can respect opt-outs and avoid repeatedly mailing addresses that cannot receive email.
Create your account, then review or import the recipients you need to exclude.
Recipient protection
Example record
Hard bounces suppress all email. Complaints suppress non-transactional email. Unsubscribe preferences are stored separately.
The single biggest lever on your reputation.
Suppression is built into the Bird Email API. Hard-bounce records stop mail to invalid addresses, and complaint records stop non-transactional mail. You can inspect the reason and originating message to understand why a recipient was rejected.
Five ways suppression protects you.
Automatic, reversible, and queryable.
- 01
Automatic on bounce + complaint.
Hard bounces and spam complaints create suppression records automatically. Unsubscribes appear in Preferences.
- 02
Reversible.
Investigate the cause before removing a suppression. Other blocking records and opt-out preferences remain in effect.
- 03
Manual entries.
Add addresses yourself: a known-bad list you're importing from another provider, say.
- 04
Queryable via API.
List the whole thing, filter by address or reason, add an entry, or delete one by its record id, so your own systems stay in sync.
- 05
Category-aware checks.
Hard-bounce and manual suppressions block all categories. Complaints block non-transactional mail. A recipient’s preferences are checked separately.
Automatic by default, yours to control.
You never have to touch the list for it to work; bounces and complaints suppress on their own. When you do need to, the whole list is an API: add an address you already know is bad, filter by address or reason, or delete a record to reinstate a recipient that recovered. The bird CLI covers the reads and the removals, and an agent reaches the same two over MCP.
# Look up why an address is on the list.
$ bird email suppressions list --email ada@example.com \
| jq -c '.data[] | {id, reason, applies_to}'
{"id":"sup_01krdgeqcxet5s7t44vh8rt9mg","reason":"hard_bounce",
"applies_to":"all"}
# Reinstate one that recovered, by record id.
$ bird email suppressions remove sup_01krdgeqcxet5s7t44vh8rt9mg --yes
Three suppression reasons. Separate preferences.
Hard bounces and manual entries block all mail. Complaints block non-transactional mail. An unsubscribe creates a separate preference; removing a suppression does not erase that preference.
| Reason | Triggered by | Blocks |
|---|---|---|
| hard_bounce | a permanent bounce | all mail (transactional + marketing) |
| complaint | a spam complaint | marketing only |
| manual | you, via API or dashboard | all mail (transactional + marketing) |
Go deeper in the docs.
Read how automatic and manual suppression work in the suppressions guide, and how it fits the bigger picture in the deliverability guide.
Put it into practice.
Continue with the documentation, guides and examples for this topic. Resources are in English.
Questions about email suppressions
Which recipients are suppressed automatically?
Is an unsubscribe a suppression?
Can I remove or test a suppression?
Protect the next send
Keep excluded recipients out of the next send.
Review suppressed addresses and carry your existing suppression list into Bird before moving production traffic.
Create your account, then review or import the recipients you need to exclude.