Data, privacy and consent

DMLY has four separate switches that people routinely confuse: opt-out, blocked, bot paused, and deleting the contact outright. They stop different things. Getting them mixed up is how a business keeps messaging someone who told it to stop. Read this first, because it is the one people get wrong:

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The four switches

Opt-out and blocked are the two that count as suppression. Both appear on Contacts → Suppressions.

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How a contact opts out

A contact opts out by sending one of these words as their whole message: stop · stopall · stop all · unsubscribe · cancel · quit · end · opt out · optout The match is exact. “cancel my appointment tomorrow” does not opt anyone out, because the message is not only the word cancel. But a contact who replies with just cancel — meaning their booking, not your marketing — is opted out immediately and silently. To opt back in, the contact sends start, unstop, subscribe, opt in or optin. On Telegram the word is /start. These are only honoured while the contact is already opted out — a contact who has never opted out cannot “double opt in” by typing subscribe. You can also clear it yourself with Resubscribe on Contacts → Suppressions. Only do that when you have a record of the contact asking.

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What opting out actually stops

At the moment a contact opts out, DMLY immediately:

• cancels any Flow they are currently running
• stops any Sequence they are enrolled in

From then on, automated messages do not reach them:

• Broadcasts — opted-out contacts are still counted into the audience unless you tick Reachable contacts only; the send itself is refused at the channel sender, so they land in the broadcast’s failed count rather than receiving the message
• Sequences — due steps skip them
• Automations — the send step refuses, and any “can I reach this contact?” check returns no
• Booking reminders — appointment reminders are not sent

DMLY also writes a system message into the conversation so your team can see what happened: “Contact opted out (STOP) — automated messages suppressed. Agents can still reply manually.”

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What opting out does not stop

Manual replies from the Inbox. The system message above is literal, not aspirational — there is no opt-out check on the Inbox send path. The composer works, the message sends, and the contact receives it. That is a deliberate design choice, because opt-out and customer service are different things: a contact who unsubscribed from your offers may still be mid-conversation about an order. It also means the discipline has to come from your team, not from the software. If you need certainty that nobody messages a person again, block the contact — blocking disables the composer, so it stops manual replies too, and it can be undone. Keep deletion for actual erasure requests.

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The Unsubscribe tag

Every workspace ships with one tag called Unsubscribe, and DMLY keeps it in step with opt-out automatically: it is attached when someone opts out and removed when they opt back in — on every channel except Telegram, where an opt-out records the date but never attaches the tag. That tag is why you cannot rename or delete it — the UI says so directly: “This tag is required for opt-out compliance and can’t be renamed.” Its practical use is in Segments. Add Unsubscribe to Exclude contacts with tags and the segment drops those people by tag as well as by timestamp — belt and braces on any audience you reuse. Because Telegram opt-outs never get the tag, treat it as the second belt rather than the thing doing the work. See Tags and segments.

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Blocking

Blocking is a different axis from opt-out and is done from the conversation in the Inbox, not from the contact’s page. It sets the contact’s status to blocked and pauses their bot in one move, and automations treat a blocked contact as unreachable. Unlike opt-out, blocking also stops manual replies. The composer is hidden, and a request that gets sent anyway is refused by the server — the same goes for payment links. The conversation shows the contact is blocked, with the note ”— replies are disabled. Unblock from the details panel to message again.” Blocking is therefore the only switch short of deletion that stops your team sending by hand, and it is reversible. Use blocking for spam, abuse and time-wasters. Use opt-out for consent. A contact can be both, and the Suppressions list shows both.

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The Suppressions list

Contacts → Suppressions is a filtered view of “Blocked and unsubscribed contacts — no automated messages are sent to them.” Filter it by Blocked or Unsubscribed. Each row gives you the action that matches its axis:

• Unblock — clears the blocked status
• Resubscribe — clears the opt-out and removes the Unsubscribe tag

Two switches, two buttons. Unblocking someone does not resubscribe them, and resubscribing someone does not unblock them. A contact who is both needs both.

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Bot paused

Pause bot reply on a contact’s page is not a consent control. It is a human hand-off: it stops automations, sequences and booking reminders for that one contact while a person deals with them, and Resume bot reply puts them back. It has no bearing on whether the contact consented to anything.

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Exporting a contact’s data

Contacts → Export streams a CSV of your contacts, honouring the channel filter you have applied. It needs the export permission — see Roles and permissions. The file has exactly seven columns, the same seven the importer reads: name, country_code, phone, tags, stage, notes, custom_fields. The country_code column is always written empty; the full number is already in phone, so a round trip back through CSV import still works. If you need to answer a data request properly today, you have to assemble it by hand from the contact’s page — Profile, Custom fields, Activity timeline, Channels, Internal notes and the conversation itself — or pull it through the API, which exposes considerably more of the record than the CSV does.

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Deleting a contact

Erasure is a hard delete. Delete contact on the contact’s page removes the contact and cascades to their channel identities, their whole message history, their internal notes, their client profile, and their tags. The confirmation says Delete <name>? This cannot be undone. and it means it. Deleting needs the delete permission, so you can keep it away from most of the team via Roles and permissions. The same delete is available through the API.

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What DMLY does not have

Being straight about the gaps is more useful than implying coverage:

• No contact-facing privacy page. There is no “request my data” or “delete my data” link you can give a contact. Every request is handled by you, by hand, in the dashboard.
• No consent record. DMLY records that someone opted out, and when. It does not record how or when they opted in. If you need proof of consent, keep it in a custom field or a note.
• No retention schedule. Data stays until you delete it.

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Practical rules for a compliant workspace