The status of a contact is important. The status determines if and what kind of email can be sent to the contact. VMA Emailer currently supports the following statuses:

Deliverable Statuses

Contacts that are not "blocked" are considered "active" and will be sent the email.

Engaged Any contact that has an Engaged status has opened or clicked an email in the last six months.  These contacts are considered the most valuable.  When Contact Delivery and Optimization Tools are enabled on the account, VMA Emailer can optimize delivery to these contacts.

Active This is more or less the "default" status for contacts that have no history.  Any new contact that is uploaded or manually added to the account will default to this status.  Note that if you are adding or uploading contacts with an Active status, you must confirm the contacts have consented to receive your communications. You can send email to Active contacts.  Contacts will also change back to Active status if they have no opened or clicked an email in the last six months.

Transactional Contacts with a transactional status have opted into transactional email only and have opted out of marketing email. Only email that uses isTransactional = true will be sent to these contacts. For more information on how to allow users to opt into transactional email only see the Unsubscribe Settings guide.

Suppressed Statuses

Contacts with a blocked status will not be sent any email.

Invalid If a contact has an Invalid Status it means that an email was sent to the contact, but the email hard bounced with an error that indicates that the email address does not exist or is permanently unavailable. For more information about hard bounces see the Bounce Category guide.

Unsubscribed This status means that the contact has unsubscribed from all email.

Complaint This status means that the contact marked the email as "Spam" or "Junk" in their email client, or reported that they never asked to receive this email from the unsubscribe page.

Inactive This status can be set up if you upload contacts that are role addresses. It is also a status that can be used to temporarily stop sending emails to the contact when desired.

Stale The Stale status works in conjunction with the Contact Pruning settings.  When Contact Pruning is enabled, any contact that exceeds the limits that are set is changed to a Stale status.

NotConfirmed This status is used for any contact that has subscribed using the Double Opt-in Web Form but has not yet verified their email address via the activation email. The contact needs to click the link in the activation email to become Active.