Keeping your contact lists clean and up to date is a great way to improve your deliverability rate and also your open rate. One way that we recommend doing this is to look at the bounces for each campaign that you send out. In your Constant Contact account, we give you the reason why a particular contact bounced. Some are self-explanatory, like Vacation/auto-reply or Non-existent.
So what exactly does it mean when a contact is Suspended?
Repeatedly sending emails to Non-existent email addresses can have a negative impact on your deliverability rate. A Suspended contact is an address that has consistently bounced as Non-existent. If this happens, the email address is put on a temporary hold for 15 days. During this time, our system will not attempt to send any campaigns to this address from any Constant Contact account. If an account attempts to send to a Suspended address, it will be included in that campaign's Suspended bounce category under the Reporting.
After the temporary hold is lifted, we will attempt to send to this address the next time that an email is scheduled for them to receive. If the address bounces as Non-existent again, the email address will be placed on an indefinite hold. We do not automatically remove these contacts; however, we do list them as Recommended for Removal under your reporting.
What if I've never sent to this contact before, and they already show as Suspended when I send my first email to them?
Email addresses can become Suspended from any Constant Contact account sending emails to it. So, although you haven't sent anything to them, there may have been another account that has tried to send to them in the past, and we then note them as Suspended based on the earlier described criteria.
If you see an address listed as Suspended that you know is a good email address, you can attempt to unsuspend the email address to reset its status. However, this will not prevent it from becoming Suspended again in the future if it does bounce as Non-Existent. Therefore, it's important that you've verified that this address is valid.
Revised April 7, 2026
