Trash and recovery
Deleting a contact in ForgeSend never removes it outright. It moves to a workspace-wide trash — Deleted Contacts, under Settings — where it sits for 30 days before an automatic purge removes it for good. There's no separate "permanent delete" button anywhere; every delete path in the product, single or bulk, goes through this same soft-delete.
On this page
Deleting a contact
There are two entry points, and they lead to the same confirmation copy and the same soft-delete underneath.
From a list detail page, open a contact row's overflow menu and choose Delete contact (red text, next to a trash icon).
From All Contacts, select one or more rows and click Delete in the selection bar — see Bulk actions for how that bar works. Either path opens the same confirmation dialog, scaled to however many contacts you've selected.
Delete 3 contacts?
This moves these contacts to Deleted contacts in Settings — they'll disappear from every list, campaign, and search right away. Restore them at any time within 30 days; after that they're permanently removed. Nothing about their existing campaign or send history changes.
The single-contact version of this dialog (from a list detail page) adds one more sentence the bulk version doesn't need: "This is different from removing them from a list, which only clears the list link." Removing a contact from a list — a separate action, covered in Lists & Contacts — never touches this trash at all; it just clears that one list membership while the contact stays fully active everywhere else.
What changes immediately
The moment a contact is deleted, it's excluded from every normal view and query in the app — All Contacts, list detail, campaign leads, search, tagging, enrollment — and becomes inert: it can't be added to a list or campaign, or tagged, while deleted. None of that requires waiting for the 30-day purge; it's instant.
What's not touched at delete time: the contact's existing campaign history, send jobs, and enrichment ledger entries all stay exactly as they were. Deleting a contact doesn't rewrite analytics or unsend anything — it only hides the contact going forward.
A deleted contact's email address can't be silently reused. If you try to re-import or re-add the same email while it's still in the trash, ForgeSend blocks it rather than reviving the old record: "This email belongs to a deleted contact. Restore it from Settings → Deleted contacts before adding new data to it." Restore it first if you want that email active again — a fresh import never bypasses the trash.
Deleted Contacts
Every soft-deleted contact in the workspace lands in one place: Settings → Deleted Contacts, under the Workspace group in the restructured Settings nav.
Selecting rows and clicking Restore clears the deletion instantly — a restored contact reappears in All Contacts, any list it belonged to, and search, exactly as it was. There's no per-row "restore reason" to fill in. With nothing in the trash, the tab shows a trash-can icon with "No deleted contacts" / "Contacts you delete will appear here for 30 days." The table paginates at 50 rows per page.
There's no bulk "empty trash" or manual permanent-delete action anywhere on this tab — Restore is the only action available. The 30-day purge below is the only way a contact leaves the trash for good.
The 30-day purge
A background job runs once a day and permanently deletes any contact that's been sitting in the trash for more than 30 days, counted from the moment it was deleted — not from when it was viewed or last touched.
Once a contact passes 30 days in the trash, its removal is permanent and irreversible — there's no extended grace period and no way to recover it afterward, even from a support request. If you're not sure whether you'll need a contact again, restore it before the 30 days are up; you can always delete it again later.
Permanent deletion at that point cascades the same way an old-style hard delete always did: list memberships, campaign-lead enrollments, send job history, and contact tags for that contact are removed along with it; enrichment ledger entries for it are kept but detached from the contact record. Restoring within the 30-day window avoids all of that — a restored contact's history is completely untouched, because none of it was ever cleaned up in the first place.
Where to go next
Next: Bulk actions