In this article, we'll explain why your contacts can be flagged after importing them or sending them an email campaign, and what you can do about it.

When your contacts get flagged, we send you an email and a notification in your Sendinblue account. Here is how flagged contacts are displayed on the Contacts page:

Contacts flagged as Pending

Contacts flagged as Declined

Contacts flagged as Review In-Progress

Contacts flagged as Declined

Why are my contacts getting flagged?

There are two reasons why your contacts may get flagged:

When you import a large number of new contacts, relative to the size of your current contact list, a verification check is automatically performed by our system to verify that they are valid contacts who gave their consent to receive emails from you.

💡 Good to know

You will receive a notification offering you the option to continue with the import and verification check or to cancel and import a smaller list of contacts.

Your contacts will remain flagged with the status Pending (or Review In-Progress for the classic Contacts page) until the verification check has been completed.

Based on the results of the verification check, there are three possible outcomes:

The contacts are automatically validated and you can send them emails.
The contacts are automatically rejected, flagged with the status Declined, and you can't send them emails.
You receive an email from our support team with questions about the list you imported. Based on your answers, the contacts are:
- validated and you can send them emails.
- rejected, flagged with the status Declined, and you can't send them emails.

When you send an email campaign to a newly imported list of contacts, Sendinblue will perform a verification check on a sample of these contacts to monitor their engagement level.

If your email campaign performs poor metrics (low open rates, high complaint rate, high hard bounce rate, etc.), which indicates that they did not recently or directly gave their consent to receive your emails, the entire recipient list will be flagged with the status Declined.

To learn how to proceed if your contacts get flagged with the status Declined, check our next section What should I do if my contacts get flagged with the status Declined?.

What should I do if my contacts get flagged with the status Declined?

You can't send emails to contacts who are flagged with the status Declined without additional list maintenance. You must delete them from your Sendinblue account and reimport a cleaned list of contacts following the procedure below.

This process allows us to maintain good deliverability and sender reputation for our shared IPs.

1️⃣ Segment your flagged contacts

Before exporting your flagged contacts, you must first segment them using our Flagged status condition (or Flagged contacts for the classic Contacts page). We highly recommend you add a dependent condition to only include subscribed contacts in your segment. That way, it will prevent you from deleting blocklisted contacts and they'll stay blocklisted.

To segment your flagged contacts:

Go to Contacts.
Click + Add a filter.
Select Contact details > Flagged status > Declined.
Click + And to add a dependent condition.
Select Email > Email campaigns subscription > Subscribed.

The segmentation results with the list of flagged contacts will appear below the segment.

To segment your flagged contacts:

Go to Contacts.
Click Advanced Search & Segmentation at the top right of your screen.
Select Flagged contacts > Declined.
Click +.
Select EMAIL Blocklisted > No.
Click Search.

The segmentation results with the list of flagged contacts will appear below the segment.

2️⃣ Export your flagged contacts

Now that you've segmented your flagged contacts, you can export them as a CSV file.

To export your flagged contacts:

In the segmentation results, check the box next to CONTACT and click Select all the # contacts.
Click More actions > Export.
Click Select All to select all the contact attributes and select the CSV field separator of your choice.
Click Export to begin the export process.
Once your export file is ready, download it from your notification center.

To export your flagged contacts:

In the segmentation results, check the box next to Email to select the contacts.
Click Export > Only Once to begin the export process.
Once your export file is ready, download it from your notification center.

3️⃣ Delete flagged contacts

❗️ Important

Note that deleting contacts is irreversible and that all their data will be permanently lost (attributes, history, etc.).

Once you’ve exported your flagged contacts, you must delete them.

To delete your flagged contacts:

In the segmentation results, check the box next to CONTACT and click Select all the # contacts.
Click More actions > Delete permanently.
Type the number of contacts that you want to delete.
Click Delete.

To delete your flagged contacts:

In the segmentation results, select the contacts.
Click Action > Delete Permanently.
Click Yes, I want to delete # contact(s).

4️⃣ Clean up your contact list

Before reimporting your contacts, you need to clean up your export file to remove any invalid and unengaged contacts.

To clean up your contact list, you can:

manually remove any invalid or unengaged contact from your list by following the guidelines from our dedicated article Optimize and clean your contact list to improve email deliverability .
use an email checker tool, such as Emailable, which will bring you clean and ready-to-use lists by automatically removing any invalid or unengaged contact.

5️⃣ Reimport your clean contact list

❗️ Important

Only import contacts who have given their consent to receive your emails. If new imports repeatedly result in contacts getting flagged with the Declined status, your Sendinblue account may incur further review or be permanently invalidated.

Once your contact list is cleaned up and all invalid or unengaged contacts are removed, you can reimport it to Sendinblue. To reimport your contacts, check our dedicated article Import contacts to Sendinblue.

6️⃣ Optional: Requeue your email campaign

If your contacts were flagged after you sent them an email campaign, only a sample of these contacts received your email campaign. Once you've reimported your contact list, you can use the Requeue feature to send your email campaign to the contacts who have not yet received it.

To learn how to requeue an email campaign, check our dedicated article Requeue, duplicate, and archive email campaigns.

🤔 Have a question?

If you have a question, feel free to contact our support team by creating a ticket from your account. If you don't have an account yet, you can contact us here.