What is the difference between deleting and blocking?

Deleting and blocking are good list hygiene practices. On the List hygiene page, you’ll find two actions—delete and block:

  • Deleting gives you the ability to remove an email address from a specific list or lists.
  • Blocking allows you to prevent specific email addresses and domains from subscribing to your current or future list or lists. It also gives you the ability to prevent people from resubscribing.

These actions will help you keep your contact list fresh and improve subscriber engagement. The more focused your list is, the better your click-through and open rates become.

When to block and when to delete?

You can accomplish different goals, depending on whether you choose to remove emails from all or specific lists, or to create blocklist rules. You can use the table below as a set of guidelines when deciding which action is best for you.

If you want to:

  • remove contacts from your account, use delete from all lists (this will remove them from your account) or specific lists
  • prevent email addresses from adding to your current or future lists, block them from your account
  • prevent people from adding to a specific list or lists in your account, block them from a list or lists
  • prevent from contacts from adding to any list you create in the future, block them from the entire account
  • remove duplicates from specific lists, delete them from those lists
  • prevent contacts in your account from receiving any of your messages, add them to a blocklist

Formerly, blocklist was known as blacklist