Sunset / sunsetting
Stopping or reconfirming people who have not engaged for a long time — protects reputation.
Say it out loud
“We stop emailing people who have ignored us for months. It sounds like losing a list; it is how the rest of it arrives.”
Sunsetting means ending regular marketing to contacts who have not engaged, usually after one re-permission attempt. Gmail and Yahoo both direct bulk senders towards willing recipients. There is no official number of days — you set the policy from your own cadence, and a weekly sender's threshold is not a quarterly sender's.
Clicks, not opens. Opens include machines, so an open-based rule keeps dead addresses and cuts live ones.
One. A four-part "we miss you" series to people who have ignored you for a year is a complaint-rate event.
What it protects
recycled spam traps activate after months of silence
complaint rate falls because the audience wants it
Yours
Nobody does this for you.
What goes wrong
Building the rule on opens. Since 2021 an inactive Apple Mail address looks engaged and an engaged image-blocking reader looks dead, so an open-based sunset policy removes precisely the wrong people.
What people get told
The claim. “There is a standard 180-day rule.”
Actually. There is not, and it is not published by any provider as a threshold. 180 days is a reasonable default for a weekly sender and meaningless for one that sends quarterly. Set it from your own cadence and write down why.
The dated rules behind this
A definition is not a citation. These are the pages with the primary source, the date it was published, and what to do about it.
See also
Where this sits
Stop 8, it comes back as numbers. The reactions become a dashboard, and the dashboard is lying to you a little.