Contact statuses explained
Subscribed, unsubscribed, cleaned and pending: what each status means and why only one of them can be emailed.
Every contact carries one of four statuses: subscribed, unsubscribed, cleaned or pending. Only a subscribed contact can be sent to. The status is account-wide (not per list), shown as a coloured dot on the contacts table, a badge on the contact’s page, and a filter on the Contacts page.
The four statuses
Subscribed: the contact can receive email. Set when you add a contact by hand, when a row imports cleanly, when someone completes a signup form, and when a recipient opts back in through your preference centre or a confirmation click.
Unsubscribed: the contact opted out. Set by the unsubscribe link in an email, by Unsubscribe from all on the preference centre, by a spam complaint, or by you clicking Unsubscribe on the contact’s page. Every one of those also writes a suppression, so the opt-out survives a re-import.
Cleaned: the address is not deliverable, or was withheld when it arrived. Set by a permanent (hard) bounce, by repeated soft bounces to the same contact, and by the import cleaner for disposable domains, domains with no mail server, and addresses already suppressed. See Soft bounces vs hard bounces.
Pending: the contact signed up through a form on a double opt-in list and hasn’t clicked the confirmation link yet. Pending contacts are never sent to and don’t count towards your plan’s contact limit. They become subscribed the moment they confirm. See Set up double opt-in on a list.
Cleaned outranks unsubscribed
If a contact is already cleaned, a later complaint or manual unsubscribe won’t change the status back: a delivery failure is the stronger fact, and cleaned is the end of the line for that address. A bounce can move an unsubscribed contact to cleaned.
Account status vs list status
A contact’s account status is separate from their membership of any one list, which is subscribed, unsubscribed or pending on its own. That’s how someone can be subscribed to your account and unsubscribed from a single list: they dropped one topic on your preference centre. Open the list and the members table shows On this list and Account status as two columns, with a tab per membership state.
Only your recipients can undo a per-list opt-out. Ticking the list’s checkbox on the contact’s edit form won’t resubscribe them.
Only subscribed is sendable, and that’s not enough on its own
A send filters on three things: the contact must be subscribed, their membership of the list you’re targeting must be subscribed, and their address must not be on your suppression list. That’s why a contact’s page can read Subscribed and still show a Suppressed badge next to it. If it does, that contact is skipped on every send.
Changing a status
You can’t set the status field by hand. Instead:
- Unsubscribe on the contact’s page opts them out and records it.
- A recipient opting back in (a confirmation click, or keeping at least one topic on the preference centre) is the only path back to subscribed for someone who opted out themselves.
- A cleaned contact can’t be moved back: not a confirmation click, not deleting and re-adding, not a re-import. If you’re confident an address was cleaned in error, email support@emailfig.com with the address and what you know.