Respecting an opt-out today is easy. Respecting it in four months, after two more scrapes of the same community and a list imported from a colleague, is where systems actually fail.
The failure is nearly always the same: somebody deleted the contact to honour the request, and in doing so removed the only thing that would have recognised the person next time.
The practical rule
Mark them Do not contact and keep the record. Deleting the contact feels like the respectful thing to do, and it is the one action guaranteed to get them messaged again: your database no longer knows they objected, so the next time you scrape that group they come back as a fresh lead. Keeping a minimal record is what makes the opt-out permanent.
What your team should do
01Why deleting an opt-out backfires.
02The difference between Not interested and Do not contact.
03What TeleBoost excludes automatically.
04The one record to keep indefinitely.
Two statuses that look similar and are not
Getting this wrong in either direction causes problems.
Marking a polite no as Do not contact throws away a lead who might buy something else next year. Marking a genuine opt-out as Not interested means they will be contacted again, which is the error that gets accounts reported. When the message is ambiguous, treat it as an opt-out: the cost of being over-cautious is one lost lead, and the cost of the other mistake is your account's standing.
| What happened | Status | What it means later |
|---|---|---|
| "Not right now" or the offer does not fit | Not interested | You may reasonably contact them about something else |
| "Stop messaging me", "remove me" | Do not contact | Excluded from campaign audiences, permanently |
Why the record has to survive
This is the part that trips up people trying to do the right thing.
Imagine you delete the contact completely. Next month you scrape the same group again, and that person appears in the results like anybody else. Nothing in your system knows they ever objected, so they go into the campaign, and they receive a second message after explicitly asking not to.
From their side, you ignored them. From yours, you deleted their data out of respect. Keeping a minimal record, enough to recognise them and nothing more, is what actually honours the request, and it is why suppression lists exist in every serious marketing system.
In TeleBoost: contacts marked Do not contact are excluded when a DM campaign audience is built, so the exclusion applies without anyone having to remember it at send time.
Make it apply everywhere, not just to campaigns
Opt-outs leak through the paths nobody thought about.
- Imports. A list from a client or a colleague can reintroduce someone you suppressed months ago.
- Other accounts. If the person opted out of messages from one of your accounts, they did not consent to hearing from a different one.
- Manual messages. The exclusion protects campaigns; a person typing in the inbox has to check.
- Other clients. If you run several, a suppression in one workspace does not automatically apply in another, and it usually should not, but be sure that is a decision rather than an accident.
Keep less about them, not more
A suppression record should be the smallest thing that works.
You need enough to recognise the person, the Telegram ID essentially, plus the fact that they objected and roughly when. You do not need to keep their profile details, your notes about their business, or the conversation history.
That distinction matters if anyone ever asks what you hold about them. "We keep your ID so we never contact you again" is a good answer. Retaining a full prospect profile for somebody who asked you to go away is not.
Never expire this list. It is the one piece of data where keeping it indefinitely is the privacy-respecting choice rather than the opposite.
How we checked this guide
Respecting opt-outs is both basic courtesy and, in most markets, a legal requirement in direct marketing. Regulators generally expect suppression to be retained precisely so the person is not contacted again. What applies to you depends on where you and your prospects are.
Keep the process clear
Check what happens in your setup today if you scrape a group containing someone who opted out last year. If they come back as a new lead, the process is broken regardless of how carefully anyone handled the original request.
An opt-out is only respected once it survives your next import.
Keep suppression connected to sending
TeleBoost keeps lists, campaigns, contacted state and conversations in one workspace, with Do not contact applied when campaign audiences are built.
Keep learning
Related TeleBoost guides
Sources