MCP

Stopping rules and suppression

TL;DR

  • Any reply stops the sequence — even a negative one. A human answered; automation never talks past a human.
  • Any opt-out, in any wording, is honored at once and suppressed permanently — a legal duty in every major regime (US and Canada among them, current) and far cheaper than one spam complaint.
  • Suppression is permanent, shared across all campaigns, and never undone by a re-import.

This page is duties, not tactics. Getting them wrong costs legally and reputationally, not just statistically.

The three stop conditions

Sequence exhausted, no engagement. The cadence ran out and nothing came back. Stop, and leave the prospect clean — no extra "one more try" outside the sequence — so a future, genuinely distinct campaign stays possible (Re-engagement).

Any reply. The sequence stops the moment a human answers — including "no," including an autoreply saying the person left. A scheduled follow-up landing after a real answer is among the most corrosive failures in outreach: it announces that nobody is reading. Route the conversation to a human (Replies and objections).

An opt-out in any wording. "Remove me." "Not interested, stop emailing." "Take me off your list." None of these need an unsubscribe link to count. Honor the request at once and suppress the address permanently. This is a legal duty in every major regime — the US CAN-SPAM rules [1] and Canada's CASL [2] among others (current, per the regulators' own guidance) — and the reputational math is lopsided: honoring an opt-out costs one contact, while ignoring it invites a spam complaint that taxes every future send. The legal frameworks themselves live in Deliverability and compliance essentials.

Suppression hygiene

The suppression list is a one-way door, and it must behave like one:

  • Permanent. No expiry, no annual cleanup, no "it has been two years."
  • Shared across campaigns. An opt-out from one campaign binds all of them; per-campaign suppression is a compliance hole, not a feature.
  • Re-import-proof. A fresh list import must never resurrect a suppressed address — check every import against suppression before anything sends.
  • Hard bounces go in too. A hard bounce means the mailbox does not exist; hitting it again tells receiving servers you do not clean your list, and sender reputation pays (Deliverability and compliance essentials).

Your sending platform can enforce none of this better than your discipline in feeding it: every opt-out, in every wording, goes into suppression the day it arrives.

References

  1. FTC — CAN-SPAM Act compliance guide (official guide, current)
  2. CRTC — CASL FAQ (official, current)