What a tag is for | AgentsMail.io Documentation

What a tag is for

A tag is a free label you put on a contact: customer, webinar-march, beta. It has no hierarchy, no meaning of its own, and no effect until you target it. Tags belong to the organization and cross lists — the same label can sit on contacts from several lists, which is exactly what makes it useful for describing a person rather than a subscription.

How you use one

Tags appear on their own screen as soon as they exist, and they can be created from anywhere a contact is touched: by hand on a contact, as batch tags during an import, or through the API. Then a tag is used in three places:

as the audience of a campaign, narrowing the list to the contacts that carry it;
as a criterion inside a segment, combined with others;
as a sequence trigger, or as a step that adds or removes a label along a journey.

Renaming a tag is safe everywhere: targeting follows the tag, not its name.

What refuses

Deleting a tag that nothing uses removes it from the contacts that carried it — the contacts themselves are untouched. Deleting a tag that a campaign targets, a sequence triggers on, or a segment references is refused, and the message names what stands in the way. Silently dropping it would change who receives a send without anyone noticing.

A tag says nothing about consent. Tagging somebody customer does not give you the right to email them, and untagging does not stop anything. What governs sending is the contact's state and their topic choices.

What it is not

	Who sets it	Scope	What it does
Tag	you	organization	describes the person
Segment	you	one list	selects part of a list from criteria
Topic	the recipient	organization	excludes a theme from what they receive

The distinction that matters most is the last one. Tags are yours to rewrite: an import can reset them, an API call can drop them. A topic refusal was expressed by a recipient, so it lives in its own place where nothing you run can erase it by accident.

What it implies elsewhere

A tag is a filter, never a widener. Targeting a tag can only reduce the audience of a campaign below the size of its list — and a tag carried by nobody in that list targets nobody at all, which is a valid campaign with zero recipients.