Avoid double-touching & suppress bad contacts

There are two things people usually mean by “suppression”: (a) emailing the same person twice across campaigns, and (b) emailing people who already bounced or opted out. There’s no single “suppression list” button in FirstSales — instead, three separate mechanisms cover both cases. This guide walks through all three.

When you import a CSV, duplicates are detected and counted automatically — the import result shows a Duplicates tile alongside Imported, Errors, and Total. The same contact isn’t inserted twice. See Import contacts from CSV.

Open Campaign → Segmentation and turn on Exclude active campaigns and Exclude completed campaigns so no contact gets touched by two campaigns at once. This is the real “don’t double-touch” control.

In the same panel, add excluded lists and excluded tags — for example, a “customers” or “do-not-contact” tag you maintain yourself. The Contact Selection summary shows Lists included and Exclusion rules counters so you can confirm your setup at a glance.

A contact’s status governs sending, in this order: unsubscribed > bounced > auto-suspended (dirty) > risky > active. An unsubscribed contact “opted out and will not receive emails” — you don’t move them anywhere; the status alone holds them back.

With the Loop opt-out brake on, replies like “stop,” “not interested,” or “do not follow up” are auto-classified as unsubscribe and halt future sequence steps. Stop-on-reply pauses the sequence the moment anyone replies at all. Keep both on. See Stop on reply & opt-out.

Run verification — address format, mail server (MX), disposable, typo, and role checks — so junk addresses are flagged before they bounce and get suppressed the hard way. See Contact verification settings.