How to Exclude Contacts From Your Email List

Successful email marketing relies on sending the right message to the right people. A part of this, that’s often overlooked, is ensuring that you're not sending messages to the wrong people.

Maybe you don’t want to email users who have already purchased. Or perhaps you want to exclude inactive users or unsubscribed contacts from your next campaign. Considering these is essential to running a clean, respectful, and high-performing email program.

So, how do you do it?

Let’s look at how you can exclude specific contacts from your email list when sending your email campaigns.

Why excluding contacts matters in email marketing

Contact exclusion is the process of deliberately removing certain contacts from receiving a specific email campaign — without permanently deleting them from your list.

Smart marketers use exclusions to create focused, relevant, and compliant campaigns that align with user behavior and intent.

Here are just a few situations where you’d want to exclude contacts:

• Avoiding duplicate sends when contacts are in multiple lists
• Excluding existing customers from new-user-only offers
• Filtering out inactive users from high-engagement promos
• Respecting unsubscribed or contacts that opted out

How to exclude contacts while sending emails

The easiest way to skip contacts while sending an email campaign is to use Mailmodo.

In fact, Mailmodo provides two powerful ways to handle contact exclusion. We’ll explore how to go about both and in which cases you might want to use one or the other, so you can make your own call.

A. Exclude contacts using segments

If you want to exclude certain users just for one or more campaigns, use the segmentation feature. The segmentation feature allows you to create a segment for those users that you want to send your emails to, based on a condition, and filter out the rest of the contacts.

Let’s say you have two lists and you want to email only those in List A but not in List B. You can simply create a segment and define this criterion.

For this, you can go to the Contacts tab and click on the Create segment button on the top right.

Here also, you get two options:

1. You can either create the segment yourself by defining the filters. Here, you can also choose to send the email to all of your contacts except for a specific segment.

2. You can ask Mailmodo AI to create a segment that doesn’t contain a specific segment by simply writing a prompt.

Mailmodo will generate a new segment that doesn’t contain the contacts you want to exclude. This segment can be reused across campaigns — no need to re-filter every time.

How to exclude contacts based on behavior

You can also go beyond static lists and exclude users dynamically based on behavior or properties. For example, you can create a condition that filters out:

• Contacts who didn’t open your last 3 emails
• Users who haven’t logged in for 60+ days
• Subscribers who already clicked a CTA in a previous campaign

Just add these filters while creating your segment. Mailmodo will auto-update this segment based on user actions, so it stays relevant over time.

B. Exclude contacts suppression lists

When you want to permanently block contacts from receiving emails, regardless of which campaign you’re sending, you can use a suppression list.

This is ideal for:

• Unsubscribed users
• Blocked or bounced contacts
• Competitors or internal team members
• Users who explicitly opted out of promotional content

Here are the steps to set it up:

1. Go to the Contacts tab and click on the three dots on the top right corner of the screen.
2. Click Import Suppression List
3. Upload a CSV of email addresses you want to exclude
4. Choose the suppression type

That’s all you have to do. Mailmodo will automatically exclude these contacts from all future campaigns. You can also download suppression lists to audit who’s currently excluded from the same three-dot menu.

Mailmodo excludes some contacts automatically

Even if you forget to exclude some contacts manually, Mailmodo has your back. It automatically skips:

• Users who’ve unsubscribed from all communications
• Emails marked as bounced or blocked

It does this because sending emails to their recipients would hurt the overall performance of your email campaigns and even hurt your domain reputation in the long run, which would result in poor email deliverability.

Conclusion

Excluding the right contacts is just as important as reaching the right ones. With Mailmodo’s smart segmentation filters, suppression lists, and built-in safeguards, you can send your campaigns confidently to the right audience, every time.