DNC
DNC — do not contact — is the strongest form of suppression: a flag on the person saying they are not to be contacted at all, on any channel, by anything. It is set and cleared by a person; the Connect Assistant is deliberately not permitted to clear one, and no allowance, rule or approval overrides it.
What it blocks, and what it does not#
- Every outbound channel, not the one the request arrived on. Somebody who asks by email not to be contacted has not agreed to a telephone call.
- Inclusion in outreach eligibility: a contact carrying it is refused before the jurisdiction question is even reached.
- Anything the engine would otherwise schedule — a follow-up whose moment arrives is refused with its reason rather than sent.
What it does not do is erase them. Their history stays, their conversations stay readable, and an inbound message from them still arrives — because a person who has asked you to stop writing may still write to you, and losing that message would be the worse error. What stops is contact you initiate.
Why it is harder to clear than to set#
Setting a do-not-contact flag is cheap and safe: at worst a workspace stops talking to somebody it could have talked to. Clearing one is neither. The cost of clearing it wrongly falls on the person who asked to be left alone, and lands on the business as a complaint or a regulator.
So the asymmetry is built in. The Connect Assistant's rights are narrower than a person's in exactly two places, and this is one of them — it may record, remember, draft and send within the rules, and it may not clear a do-not-contact entry. The other is pricing. Both are commitments a business makes rather than tasks it delegates.
Four things that are not this#
- A national do-not-call register
- A regulatory list maintained outside your business. Connect's flag is the workspace's own record of a decision it made, and this manual does not claim any registry integration.
- An unsubscribe
- A narrower request, usually about promotional mail on one channel. It creates a suppression; it is not automatically a do-not-contact entry, and treating every unsubscribe as one would stop replies people are waiting for.
- A block directive in memory
- Stops Connect acting on a channel for a contact. Useful, and weaker: it is a direction to the engine rather than a refusal at the send boundary.
- Deleting the record
- Removes the history you may need. People are merged, not deleted, and a do-not-contact flag is the right way to say *leave them alone* while keeping what happened.
The first is worth being precise about, because the abbreviation is shared. In this manual DNC always means the flag on a record in your workspace. Whatever obligations a national register places on your business are yours and are unaffected by anything Connect stores.
Questions#
Where do I set it?
On the person, and in the leads sheet in Data, where it is an editable column and can be applied to several rows at once.
Does it stop a person in my team from emailing them?
It stops Connect. A colleague sending from their own mail client is outside Connect entirely — which is worth knowing, because the flag protects the automated path and not the human one.
Is a do-not-contact entry visible to whoever looks at the record?
Yes, on the record and in any list that shows the column, so somebody about to start a conversation sees it before they start rather than after.