Erase a contact (right to be forgotten)

Contacts, lists & segmentsUpdated

Permanently remove a person's details from your account, one contact at a time: what goes, what stays, and why it can't be undone.

Open the contact, click Erase…, read the dialog, then click Erase permanently. This is the action for someone exercising a right to erasure. It removes their personal details from your account for good (including their name on every past send and report), and it cannot be undone. It’s one contact at a time; there’s no bulk erase.

Erase vs Delete

Delete takes someone off your lists. They stop being mailed, stop counting towards your plan, and adding the address again brings the record back.

Erase removes the person. There’s nothing to bring back.

If someone just wants to stop hearing from you, that’s Unsubscribe, not Erase.

What goes

  • Their email address, name and custom-field values.
  • Their signup records: form submissions, IP, consent wording.
  • Their name against every past send, report, and open, click and bounce event.

Those sends keep their totals, they just no longer have a person attached. A campaign that reported 400 unique opens still reports 400.

What stays, and why

Their suppression stays. If they had unsubscribed, bounced or complained, that row remains on your suppression list, holding their plain address. Erasing someone should never make them mailable again: without that row, the next CSV import would create a fresh contact for the same address and start mailing someone who had already said no.

If the person had opted out of a single list, that opt-out is promoted to an account-wide suppression before the contact is deleted, for the same reason.

There is no undo, no recycle bin and no export of what was removed. Take anything you need first.

What erasure can’t reach

An import CSV you uploaded, or an export we generated for you, holds every address in one file and can’t be scrubbed person by person. We delete both automatically after 30 days. If you’re processing an erasure request and an upload from last week contains that address, be aware of it.

Running it

  1. Contacts → click the person’s address.
  2. Click Erase….
  3. Read the dialog: it names what goes and what stays.
  4. Click Erase permanently.

You’ll land back on the contacts page with a confirmation. Erasing is safe to submit twice.

Where to go next