Contact Settings in Act-On All Contacts

  • Updated

Control how Act-On handles soft bounces, suppression domains, and email fatigue using Contact Settings in All Contacts. These settings apply to every contact in your account and help protect your deliverability and send reputation.

Quick Reference (Advanced Users) - Click to Expand
  • Inactive Soft Bounces: Set a soft-bounce limit (ex: 3–5). Leaving it blank disables the safeguard.
  • Email Suppression Domains: Add domains to block all sends to those addresses.
  • Fatigue Suppression Rules: Cap how many marketing emails a contact receives in a chosen timeframe (ex: 3 emails per 7 days).
  • Changes appear in Lists → Other Lists → Bounces & Opt-Outs and apply account-wide.
Try it like this: Limit contacts to 25 marketing emails every 90 days, set a soft-bounce threshold of 5, and suppress domains for competitors or internal aliases you never want to message.

Open Contact Settings

You can access Contact Settings two ways:

  • From All Contacts, select the three dots menu and choose Contact settings.
  • Go to Settings → Other Settings → Contact Settings.

All_Contacts___Contact_Settings_Menu.png

Heads up! Updates here also appear in Lists → Other Lists → Bounces & Opt-Outs. These rules apply to your entire Act-On account, not just the All Contacts list.

Inactive Soft Bounces

Set the number of soft bounces Act-On tolerates before a contact is added to the Inactive Soft Bounce segment. Once a contact enters this segment, they stop receiving email from your account. This keeps your deliverability healthy and reduces repeated temporary failures.

Inactive_Soft_Bounce_Settings.png

If you send frequently, consider a lower threshold. If you send less often, you may choose a slightly higher one. For guidance, see the related article on bounce thresholds.

Be careful! Leaving this threshold blank prevents contacts from ever entering the Inactive Soft Bounce segment, which can damage deliverability over time.

Email Suppression Domains

Use suppression domains to block all sends to email addresses belonging to specific domains. This is useful when you want to avoid sending to:

  • Competitors
  • Internal aliases or testing domains
  • Subsidiaries or partners who shouldn’t receive marketing email

Type the domain (for example, @example.com or example.com) and Act-On suppresses all email messages to addresses using that domain.

Email_Suppression_Domains.png

Fatigue Suppression Rules

Fatigue suppression helps you prevent over-messaging and protects your sender reputation. Create rules that limit how many marketing emails a contact can receive during a defined timeframe. When someone hits the limit, Act-On pauses additional marketing sends to that contact until the timeframe resets.

Fatigue_Suppression_Settings.png

Examples include:

  • 5 marketing emails every 2 days
  • 25 marketing emails every 90 days
  • 1 marketing email per day
Tip! Event Reminder emails and Form Auto-Response emails do not count toward fatigue suppression limits.

Next Steps

  • Review contact activity in All Contacts segments to see who is currently suppressed.
  • Check your Bounces & Opt-Outs list to monitor soft-bounce and domain suppression impact.
  • Adjust rules as your sending frequency changes over time.

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