Setting up automatic deletion of contacts

The contact management application generates a very large amount of data, particularly on high‑traffic websites. The system creates contacts and logs activities for every visitor (depending on the Default cookie level), which may be overwhelming for your marketers. To address this, we recommend that you configure the system to regularly delete contacts that meet certain conditions. This allows you to filter out inactive, outdated or otherwise unnecessary contacts without having to remove them individually.

Setting automatic contact deletion not only helps you keep only active contacts in the system, but can also improve system performance.

Configuring automatic contact deletion

You can configure automatic contact deletion in the Settings application.

1. Open the Settings application.
2. Navigate to the On‑line marketing -> Contact management -> Inactive contacts category in the settings tree.
3. Select one of the deletion options:
   • Delete contacts who were not active for the last X days
   • Delete contacts without an email address that were not active for the last X days
   • Or create your own custom contact deletion configuration
4. In last X Days, specify the number of days for which contacts have to be inactive to be deleted by the system.
   • The minimum value is 10 days.
   • For contacts that haven’t performed any activity, the system considers the date of their creation as the last time they were active.
5. Click Save.

The system now deletes inactive contacts based on the selected settings.

Customizing automatic contact deletion settings

If none of the settings available for contact deletion suit your needs, you can programmatically create your own configuration. Do that by adding and registering a custom implementation of the IDeleteContacts interface:

1. Create a class that implements the IDeleteContacts interface (we recommend adding the class within a custom Code Library).

2. Implement your own logic for how inactive contacts should be deleted. The following example configures the system to delete all contacts that do not have a value filled in for the ContactStateID field.

   Copy

   
   
   
    using System;
    using System.Linq;
   
    using CMS.DataEngine;
    using CMS.ContactManagement;
   
    [assembly: RegisterDeleteContactsImplementation(
        "DeleteContactsCustom",
        "settingskey.om.deleteinactivecontacts.method.custom",
        typeof(DeleteContactsCustom))]
   
    /// <summary>
    /// Custom implementation for deleting inactive/unnecessary contacts.
    /// </summary>
    public class DeleteContactsCustom : IDeleteContacts
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// Deletes contacts.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="days">The number of days specified in the settings. Use the parameter if you want to delete contacts older than this number of days.</param> 
        /// <returns>The number of contacts that haven't been deleted.</returns>
        public int Delete(int days, int batchSize)
        {
            var whereCondition = GetWhere();
            ContactInfoProvider.DeleteContactInfos(whereCondition, batchSize);
            return ContactInfo.Provider.Get().Where(whereCondition).Count();
        }
   
        /// <summary>
        /// Selects all contacts that do not have a 'ContactStateID' (are from outside the US).
        /// </summary>
        public string GetWhere()
        {
            var condition = new WhereCondition();
            condition.And(new WhereCondition().WhereEmpty("ContactStateID"));
            return condition.ToString(true);
        }
    }
   
   
    

3. Register the class using the RegisterDeleteContactsImplementation attribute.

The customization is now available as a new option in Settings (application) -> On‑line marketing -> Contact management -> Inactive contacts.