problem using ExclusionFilter without emailaddress

Question

I am trying to setup a filter for my triggered sends. I want to exclude all of my users who exist in a certain Data extension: "DE_1" and have the column 'Email_Hater' with value 'True'. DE_1 has two columns: Custom_ID (Text) & Email_Hater (Text)

I want to use an exclusion filter like this:

exclusion_filter='ROWCOUNT(LOOKUPROWS("DE_1", "Custom_ID", customid, "Email_Hater", "true")) > 0'

My custom_ID is hooked up with in my Contact builder, and I reference it a lot in my amp-script emails. However it looks like the exlusion_filter is not recogizing it.

I have used exclusion filter before using email address i.e.

exclusion_filter='ROWCOUNT(LOOKUPROWS("OPTOUTS", "EmailAddress", emailaddr, )) > 0'

However since DE_1 doesn't have email as a column, and it would be a trouble to add it, I was wondering if exlusion_filters can only reference ID's of the subscriber objects or something (i.e EmailAddress, SubscriberKey)

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

Ampscript wont infer contact builder relations in many parts of the app. Eventually(tm), Guide Template Language will handle that. You'll need to recreate the relations with multiple lookups.

Another approach - you could utilize ampscript in the email to conditionally call RaiseError with the secondary argument set to 1:

RaiseError("Something ain't right",1)  

This will cause just that send to fail, but not kill the whole job.

From a best practices perspective, Triggered sends are ment to be very functional - the 'right' answer is that, if you dont want someone to get a triggered send, dont send the API call in the first place. That might not be relevant or easy with your use case, but i figured i'd call it out.