Excluding Customers from Mailings
There is no need to delete customers who are inactive or who shouldn't be on the mailing list. Even if a customer is never coming back it can be helpful to keep the customer profile and history.
To exclude customers from mailings, the "traditional" approach was to assign them certain non-mailing Customer Types - such as NM or MV (no mail, Moved, etc.)
Once those customers are marked, when running a customer report, choose EXCLUDE ‘MV’ type customers:
Another simple approach that some people prefer is to erase the zip code because when you do mailings, you're likely to include a zip code range (e.g. for your state or region) and so customers with no zip code will be excluded.
You could put the customer's zip code in the notes for future reference or one-off hand-mailings.
To be more sure, you could erase the entire address - in which case you'd want to note the prior address in the customer Notes box.
Even in this case you might leave in the City, so if you ever saw the name in the list it might show as:
Jones, Samantha Newton
and seeing the name and city together may be meaningful for you.
Similarly, if you leave the first address line blank or the city blank, when you do mailings you can choose to Exclude customers with Missing Addresses to exclude them.
Note that to avoid automatically filling in every new customer's profile with a zip code, you will want to verify that the default zip code and default city, and possibly area code, are blank.
That's on the first page of Preferences. ( These days, with the proliferation of zip codes and new city names, it's less common that a majority of customers are all from the same zip and city. Similarly there are many more phone area-codes, especially with overlapping zones for mobile phones.)
