Erase a contact (right to be forgotten)
Permanently remove a person's details from your account: what goes, what stays, and what erasing can't reach.
Open the contact, click Erase…, read the dialog, then click Erase permanently. Use this when someone asks you to delete their data under their right to be forgotten. It removes their personal details from your account for good, including their name on every past send and report. It can’t be undone.
If someone only wants to stop hearing from you, use Unsubscribe instead. Delete takes a contact off your lists, but adding the address again brings them back. Erasing leaves nothing to bring back.
What’s removed
- Their email address, name and custom field values, and their lists and tags.
- Their signup records, including IP addresses, and any comment they left when unsubscribing.
- Their name against every past send, open, click and bounce. Reports keep their totals, without a person attached.
- Any automation they’re part-way through stops.
What’s kept
Their suppression. If they unsubscribed, bounced or complained, the address stays on your suppression list, so a later import can’t start mailing them again. If they had left only one of your lists, that becomes an unsubscribe from everything, for the same reason.
What erasing can’t reach
- CSV files. An import file you uploaded, or an export you downloaded from us, still holds the address. We delete uploaded and exported files 30 days after the import or export finishes, and 90 days after upload for an import that never finished. Delete any copies you downloaded yourself.
- Webhooks already sent. The tools that received them keep their own copy, so erase the person there too. Webhooks about them that haven’t gone out yet are cancelled.
There’s no undo and no copy of what was removed. Save anything you need before you erase.
When it’s done, you’re taken back to the contacts page with a confirmation. The API’s delete contact endpoint erases in exactly the same way. See Using the EmailFig API.