Archiving and deleting people

Archiving a person soft deletes them from your main people list. The archive is a safety net for holding contacts if you accidentally archived them and don’t want to delete them, or just want to move them out of your main list temporarily.

When you archive a person, they:

  • Will automatically be deleted after 29 days unless you restore or manually delete them.

  • Can no longer be found via search, which only operates on people in your main people list; you can only search for "type": "archived" (via the get endpoint).

  • Can no longer be involved in campaigns, reports, dashboards, or audiences, as well as be associated with activities.

  • Are removed from the contact count of your Ortto plan (for pricing purposes).

The process to delete a contact is first to archive it, then to delete it. Archived contacts stop receiving updates but are still available in your account to view and export. Archived contacts to not count towards your plan contact limit. Once you archive them if you want to, you can delete them permanently. You can do batches of contacts up to 100 at once.

Archived people will automatically be deleted after 29 days (deleted on day 30).

Exercise caution when archiving people, since doing so puts them in a state where they are no longer tracked or recognized.

If Ortto receives an activity involving an archived person from a data source (which is configured to add unknown people by default) then a duplicate contact/person record will be created for this person in your CDP.

The duplicate person will not retain the person’s original subscription status (unless created as an unsubscribed record via a data source or via the appropriate API call), as the duplicate is treated as a new record. Similarly, should you re-add people you have archived, you will need to verify their subscription status before they are added back.

Here is how to archive contacts:

curl --request PUT \
	--url https://api.ap3api.com/v1/person/archive \
	--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
	--header 'X-API-KEY: API_KEY' \
	--data '{
		"inclusion_ids": ["00609384fa6de6e7a8d89d01"]
	}'

where inclusion_ids is an array of strings representing contact IDs.

Ortto customers who have their instance region set to Australia or Europe will need to use specific service endpoints relative to the region:

  • Australia: https://api.au.ap3api.com/

  • Europe: https://api.eu.ap3api.com/

For example: https://api.eu.ap3api.com/v1/<entity/endpoint>

All other Ortto users will use the default service endpoint (https://api.ap3api.com/).

You can obtain the contact ID using the get endpoint to retrieve one or more people. Or, find the contact ID in the Ortto app by viewing the contact’s profile and copying the ID from the URL (e.g. https://ortto.app/myinstance/cdp/people/00626f6dfba865ba45d9c200/activities?from=cdp-filter&key=people-all-).

If you need to restore an archived contact, you can do it like so:

curl --request PUT \
	--url https://api.ap3api.com/v1/person/restore \
	--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
	--header 'X-API-KEY: API_KEY' \
	--data '{
		"inclusion_ids": ["00609384fa6de6e7a8d89d01"]
	}'

Here is how to delete contacts (once they are archived):

curl --request DELETE \
	--url https://api.ap3api.com/v1/person/delete \
	--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
	--header 'X-API-KEY: API_KEY' \
	--data '{
		"inclusion_ids": ["00609384fa6de6e7a8d89d01"]
	}'