# Retrieve a marketing preference `GET /api/v1/marketing-preferences/{contactId}` Whether this person may be mailed, per channel, right now. Read it immediately before a send. BRANCH ON subscribed, NOT ON state. state carries the full vocabulary (subscribed, pending, unsubscribed, never) and only the first is mailable: pending is an opt-in that was never confirmed and never is silence rather than a recorded refusal. subscribed collapses the three non-mailable states into false, so the safe read is also the short one. erased OVERRIDES EVERY CHANNEL. It means this person's data was wiped under an erasure request, so the address is gone and nothing may be sent whatever the last consent state said. email is null for a contact resolved from an anonymous id or a phone number, and for one that has been erased. Key your suppression records on contact_id and treat the address as a label. THERE IS NO COLLECTION HERE. A list would be the marketing database re-served through a second path; read /api/v1/marketing-contacts and filter on the consent fields it carries. ## Path parameters - `contactId` (string, required) ## Responses - `200` — Success - `400` — The request was refused before any state changed. `code` is one of: `invalid_body`, a write body this route will not take. `reason` partitions it and `field` names the key when one key is at fault. `invalid_query`, a query parameter, including limit and after. `invalid_text`, a NUL byte or bytes that are not valid UTF-8 anywhere in the path, the query or the body. Strip control characters before sending. `idempotency_key_required`, a write sent without the Idempotency-Key header. `invalid_request`, an Idempotency-Key longer than 255 bytes. Routes add their own codes for rules only they know. Switch with a default arm. - `401` — No credential, or one this API does not accept. `code` is always `unauthorized`. THE BODY IS DELIBERATELY UNINFORMATIVE. An expired key, a revoked key, a publishable key, a key belonging to another merchant and a key that never existed are all refused with the same bytes, so this response cannot be used to probe which keys exist. Check the key's state in the dashboard rather than inferring it here. Send the key as `Authorization: Bearer ` or as `X-API-Key: `. It is never accepted in a query string. - `403` — The key lacks the read_marketing_contacts scope. `code` is `insufficient_scope` and the message names the scope to ask the merchant for. - `404` — The resource this url addresses does not exist, or never did on this store. `resource` names the kind of thing that was missing and is the half to branch on: the code is `not_found` on newer routes and a per-entity spelling on routes that shipped before that rule, and the two mean the same thing. A 404 is ALWAYS about the url. An id inside the request body that resolves to nothing is 422 `unprocessable_reference` instead, so the two cases stay distinguishable. An id that belongs to a different merchant reads exactly like one that never existed. - `429` — Too many requests. `code` is `rate_limited`. Two limits apply independently: one on the credential and the route family, one on the client address. The headers describe whichever has less left, so honouring Retry-After always clears the window that bound. - `default` — Any status this operation does not list, in the same envelope. A 5xx means the request may or may not have applied. Retry it with the SAME Idempotency-Key: that is the only way to find out without risking a duplicate, and it is what the key is for. A few 4xx conditions arrive here rather than as a listed status because they depend on the merchant's plan or on a module being wired: 402 when a quota or a plan limit is reached, and 503 when a capability the route needs is not configured on this deployment. Both carry a `code` naming which. ## Example ```bash curl --request GET \ --url 'https://api.mercemur.com/api/v1/marketing-preferences/{contactId}' \ --header 'Authorization: Bearer ' ```