When someone unsubscribes

The two ways out

Every marketing email carries two opt-out routes, and they behave differently. Knowing which one a recipient used tells you whether you can fix it yourself.

You can tell them apart in your dashboard only indirectly: both end up as a suppression on the contact. If you are unsure which route someone took, treat it as the second and ask us — checking is quick and costs nothing.

Topics: choosing less

Without topics, unsubscribing is all-or-nothing. Someone who wants your product notes but not your newsletter has one control, and it stops everything — so the people who only wanted less end up gone entirely, and some of them reach for the spam button instead, which is the one thing list cleaning cannot undo.

A topic is a label you put on a campaign. Three rules govern what it does, and the middle one is the one people are surprised by:

• Tagged with a topic — anyone who opted out of that topic is left out of the send. They keep receiving your other mail.
• No topic — goes to everyone subscribed. Topic opt-outs do not apply to an untagged campaign, so someone who kept only one topic still receives it. Untagged is your general mail, and only a full unsubscribe stops it. If you want a campaign to respect the choices people made, tag it.
• The footer lists all of them — recipients see every topic you have created, whichever one this particular send is tagged with. That is what makes the page a way back rather than a dead end.

You do not have to store a subscription for anyone. We record opt-outs only, so a contact with no record is subscribed to everything — which means creating your first topic never silently stops mail to people who have not heard of it yet.

One thing to know about the footer: with topics defined, it offers two choices — choose which emails you get and unsubscribe from everything. The second is our delivery provider’s own link, which every marketing message must carry. Defining a topic is what lets us place that link deliberately as the second choice rather than having it appended separately, so recipients see one footer instead of two.

Bringing someone back

Two routes, and the first one needs nothing from you at all.

They can do it themselves

If you have set up topics, the unsubscribe page is a preference centre rather than a dead end: it tells the recipient they are off everything and offers to put them back on the parts they still want. Keeping any topic lifts the suppression and re-subscribes them automatically. The link in the email they already have keeps working, so someone who changes their mind an hour later can simply reopen it.

This is the strongest argument for creating at least one topic. Without topics the page can only confirm the unsubscribe, and every recovery has to go through you.

You can do it from the dashboard

On the Audience page, open the contact and press Un-suppress — or select several and use the Un-suppress action in the selection bar. That clears the opt-out on your side and puts them back in your sending audience. Do this only when the person has actually asked: a re-subscribe they did not request is the fastest way to earn a spam complaint, which costs you far more than a lost subscriber.

When it needs us

If the recipient left through the mailbox’s own Unsubscribe button, or through the provider link in the footer, clearing the suppression on your side is not enough. The delivery provider holds a separate record, and it will keep refusing that address even though your dashboard shows them subscribed. The symptom is a contact who looks fine in your audience but never appears in a campaign’s delivery report.

If you are the recipient rather than the sender, contact the company whose email you were receiving — they own the list and the relationship, and their request is what we act on.

What is never reversed

Unsubscribes are a preference and can be taken back. Two other kinds of suppression are different in kind, and a bulk un-suppress deliberately refuses them — it reports how many it left alone rather than folding them into the total:

• Hard bounces. The address does not exist. Sending to it again does not make it exist; it just tells inbox providers you mail dead addresses.
• Spam complaints. Someone marked your mail as spam. Mailing them again is the single most damaging thing you can do to your sending reputation, and it affects every other campaign you send.

You can still override either one from the contact itself, one at a time — the product asks you to make that choice deliberately rather than sweeping it into a bulk action. It is almost always the wrong call. The exception worth a conversation is an address that bounced because of a temporary fault at the receiving end which you know has been fixed; that is a different request from a mistaken unsubscribe, so say which one you mean.

Why we don’t do it automatically

PristineSend never tells the delivery provider that someone has resubscribed, and never tells it that someone has unsubscribed through your footer link. Both would look like tidiness and both are traps.

The provider treats an opt-out a person made themselves as theirs, not ours — a resubscribe we assert on their behalf is refused, so automating it would fail in exactly the case it exists for. Pushing the other direction is worse: filing an opt-out with the provider that the person made through your footer would convert a reversible choice into a permanent one, and close the door this page is about.

So the recovery is deliberately a human step. It is rare, it is quick, and it keeps the reversible case reversible.