It is important to note that the Suppression lists in a SendGrid account are not the same as contacts stored in Marketing Campaigns > Contacts. Suppression lists are repositories of addresses that will have requests dropped, and they do not count toward contact storage. However, dropped requests will consume email credits.
SendGrid contact storage is not linked to any suppression lists. Deleting or changing contacts under Marketing > Contacts will not have any affects or remove any addresses from any lists under the Suppressions tab in the account.
Instead, Suppression lists require specific steps to edit safely in order to avoid sending emails to previously suppressed recipients and damaging sender reputation. If you would like to safely clean your Suppression lists, here are the instructions to follow in order to remove those suppressed contacts from the account.
- When viewing your dashboard, navigate to the left-hand menu and click Suppressions.
- Open a specific group, i.e. Global Unsubscribes, click the action menu in the upper right corner, then select Download as CSV.
- Repeat step 2 for each of the groups that you want to remove (unsubscribes, spam reports, etc.) and merge each of those lists into a single CSV file.
- Return to your dashboard, navigate to the left-hand menu and select Marketing, then Contacts.
- In the upper right corner click Add Contacts and select Upload CSV.
- Select Create New List and name it something obvious, like "Remove Invalid Emails."
- Once successfully uploaded, allow 30 min for our systems to update, then click the action menu to the right of that new list and select Delete.
- Check the box indicating to delete "all contacts associated with this list."