Resources

Contact statuses

subscribed, unsubscribed, bounced, complained — and what suppresses resubscription.

Statuses

Status	Meaning
`subscribed`	Receives mail
`unsubscribed`	User opt-out; API-flippable
`bounced`	Deliverability suppression via SES
`complained`	Deliverability suppression via SES

Unsubscribe is idempotent. Unsubscribing a contact that is already unsubscribed is a no-op — it succeeds without changing anything, so retries are safe.
Resubscribe is blocked after suppression. A contact whose status is bounced or complained cannot be resubscribed through the API: the resubscribe endpoint answers 409 Conflict with contact_suppressed. Deliverability suppression is safety-critical — it reflects what receiving providers told SES about your mail, and it overrides marketing intent.
Bounce and complaint transitions come from SES events, not the API. You cannot set a contact to bounced or complained yourself; those flips happen when SES bounce and complaint events arrive. See Tracking and events for the inbound event flow.

What a bounced or complained email looks like from the sending side is covered in Email lifecycle.

Email lifecycle

Every email status and how emails move between them.

Tracking and events

Open and click tracking, inbound SES events, and the outbound-webhook status.