Managing List Health: Sunsetting and Engagement
Managing List Health: Sunsetting and Engagement
Purpose: Limiting your sends to engaged recipients is the most impactful ongoing action you can take to protect inbox placement. This article explains how to build a sunset policy using Sure Send Smart Lists.
Before You Begin
Smart Lists are required to build a sunset policy in Sure Send. If you haven’t built one before, start with Smart Lists: Create & Use. For the full list of available engagement filters, see Smart List Filters: Field Reference.
Why List Health Matters
The higher the share of your recipients who engage positively with your messages, the more confident mailbox providers become that your mail belongs in the inbox. The reverse is also true: consistently mailing unengaged recipients lowers your engagement ratios, raises spam complaints, and gradually damages your sending reputation.
Proactively removing your least-engaged recipients is the most direct way to protect and improve those ratios.
What Is a Sunset Policy?
A sunset policy is a rule that automatically identifies recipients who’ve stopped engaging with your messages and stops sending to them. The most common version sets a threshold, a number of unengaged sends or a stretch of time with no engagement, after which a recipient stops receiving mail.
Setting Your Threshold
There’s no single correct number. Your threshold should reflect your sending frequency and what counts as meaningful disengagement for your audience.
| Threshold | Use Case |
|---|---|
| 12 months of no engagement (minimum) | The floor for any sender. After a year of no opens or clicks, you risk mailing spam trap or abandoned addresses, which can lead to blocklisting. |
| 60 messages or 6 months, whichever comes first (recommended) | A more protective approach that keeps your active list focused on recipients who’ve engaged recently. |
Start conservative. A threshold that’s too aggressive suppresses recipients who might still convert. Preview how many recipients a rule would affect before applying it.
Building a Sunset Policy with Smart Lists
Build a Smart List that excludes contacts who haven’t opened or clicked within your chosen window, using the Last Email Opened, Last Email Clicked, Email Opens Count, or Email Clicks Count filters (see Smart List Filters: Field Reference). Target that Smart List for your campaigns to automatically focus sends on your active recipients, without manually cleaning your list before every send.
Basic approach: exclude contacts where Last Email Opened “Was More Than 180 days ago” AND Last Email Clicked “Was More Than 180 days ago,” adjusted to your chosen window.
Advanced Sunsetting
Sure Send’s Deliverability Suite offers deliverability-specific engagement data, including messages since last engagement and provider-specific thresholds (a stricter rule for Outlook recipients, for example, since they tend to be more sensitive to unengaged sends). [VERIFY: Confirm current Engagement Tag field names and exact Deliverability Suite capabilities. This is documented in “Understanding the Sure Send Deliverability Suite,” which is published on the live Help Center but not yet mirrored into this Outline collection.]
Tips
Tip: A sunset policy doesn’t mean you can never re-engage dormant contacts. It means doing so intentionally, with a dedicated re-engagement campaign, rather than continuing to mail them alongside your active audience and letting their disengagement drag down your overall reputation.
What’s Next
If your metrics still look off after cleaning up your list, work through Troubleshooting Email Deliverability Issues next.