How do I suspend a team member temporarily?

Suspension is the in-between option on Valid Email Checker: harder than ignoring a member, softer than removing them. If a member is going on parental leave, a contractor is between project phases, or you simply do not want them touching the account for a stretch while you sort something out, suspension cleanly blocks their access without losing their account, their history, or their integration connections. The action is one click on the Team page.

How to suspend

1. Open Account Settings → Team.
2. Find the member you want to suspend in the table.
3. Click the yellow Ban icon (the circle-with-slash symbol) in the Actions column. The tooltip reads 'Suspend.'
4. The status badge for that row flips from green Active to red Suspended.

What happens server-side the moment you click

Three things in quick sequence:

1. Status flips to `suspended` in the database. The team_members.status column updates from active to suspended.
2. All active sessions for that member are terminated. The system calls manage-sessions?action=terminate-all-user-sessions against the member's user ID. If they are mid-session on the dashboard, the next request returns 401 and they get bounced to the login screen. Anything they had open closes within seconds via the realtime subscription.
3. A suspension email is sent to the member. Subject indicates the account is suspended. No login link — there would be nothing to do at it.

What suspension blocks

• Logging in (the auth check rejects suspended members at the session layer).
• Any active session — they cannot continue what they were doing.
• API calls authenticated as that member (relevant if they had an owner-issued key tied to their user ID, but normally keys belong to the owner so this is rare).
• Integration callbacks that depend on the member being logged in.

What suspension does NOT do

• Does NOT delete their history. Past verifications stay on the account exactly as they were — for audit, for download, for everything.
• Does NOT disconnect their integrations from your account. Their Mailchimp/HubSpot/etc connections remain in place and other members or the owner can still use them.
• Does NOT refund credits they spent before suspension. Past spending is past spending; the shared pool is the shared pool.
• Does NOT block their email from being re-invited later. They are still in your team list with a Suspended badge — reactivating is a click away.

How long can a suspension last?

Indefinitely. There is no auto-expiry on a suspended account. We have customers who have left contractors in the Suspended state for over a year, then reactivated when a project came back. The member never sees any movement until you act. The only thing that changes during the suspension is normal stuff — credits going up and down on the shared pool — and the suspended member would not be able to see any of it because they cannot log in.