Automated List Hygiene With the Sunset Engine

The Automated Sunset Engine scans your contact list nightly for subscribers who have gone completely quiet — no opens, clicks, form submits, or purchases beyond your configured threshold — and either routes them into a re-engagement journey or suppresses them automatically. No manual list export, no periodic reminder to run the clean-up.

Inactive contacts are a deliverability liability, not just a vanity metric problem. Sending to contacts who never engage drives up your bounce-to-open ratio and signals to mailbox providers that recipients didn't ask for your email — which harms your sender reputation for the entire list, not just the quiet slice. The Automated Sunset Engine removes that liability on a schedule, before it becomes a reputation problem.

What counts as inactive

A contact is inactive when their most recent engagement timestamp — the latest of any open, click, form submission, or e-commerce purchase across your whole account — is older than your configured inactivity threshold (60–180 days, defaulting to 90). Contacts added to your list but who have never engaged are measured from their row creation date.

Two-phase approach: re-engage first, suppress after

The recommended configuration uses both steps:

1. Re-engagement journey: Set your win-back journey (a scratch-off offer, a special discount, a "we miss you" poll) as the Sunset Policy's re-engagement journey. Newly-inactive contacts are enrolled into that journey before anything else happens.
2. Auto-suppress non-responders: Contacts who complete (or exit without engaging) the re-engagement journey and are still inactive at the next nightly sweep are suppressed with reason "sunset".

This means a legitimate re-engager who just hadn't opened in a while gets one more chance, while persistent non-responders are cleaned up without anyone having to manually review a list.

Configuring it

Go to Settings → Deliverability → Sunset Policy:

| Setting | Recommended value | |---|---| | Enabled | On | | Inactivity threshold | 90 days (adjust to 60 for a tighter list, 180 for a very slow-cycle audience) | | Re-engagement journey | Your existing win-back journey | | Auto-suppress | On (after 30-day grace period with journeys only) |

What suppressed contacts see

Nothing — a sunset-suppressed contact is simply skipped by every send. They remain in your contacts list (with a "Suppressed: sunset" badge) and can be resubscribed manually if they contact you directly.

Measuring the impact

Monitor your open rate trend in the first 60 days after enabling auto-suppress. A clean-up of genuinely inactive contacts should push your open rate up, since the denominator (recipients) is smaller while engaged recipients remain. If open rate drops, review whether the threshold is too aggressive for your send cadence.

Getting started

1. Build a win-back journey or install the Re-engagement starter.
2. Go to Settings → Deliverability → Sunset Policy, enable the policy, point it at your journey, and set your threshold.
3. Start with autoSuppress: false for 30 days to observe which contacts the engine is catching before suppression goes live.

See Automated Sunset Engine for the full settings reference.