Deleting a subscriber

Deleting a subscriber removes their details for good. Use it when somebody asks you to erase what you hold about them, and unsubscribe them instead when they only want the emails to stop.

How to delete one, and how to delete many

Two routes, both of which ask you to confirm.

Open a subscriber from the list and there is a Delete subscriber button, with a confirmation naming the address so a mis-click on the wrong row is caught. For more than one, select rows on the subscriber list and choose Delete from the bar that appears, which confirms with a count and says plainly that it cannot be undone. Selection works a page at a time, which is a useful brake: there is no way to delete everything your filters match in one keystroke.

What is removed

The subscriber row and everything on it.

That means the email address, the first name, the status, the source, the signup and confirmation dates, the address they signed up from, and any metadata recorded alongside. Nothing is kept in a recoverable state and nothing is marked as deleted while staying in the table. After the delete, searching your list for that address finds nothing, and their entry in an export is gone from the next file you take.

What survives, and why

One thing stays: the row in each issue’s send log that recorded a message going out, with the reference to the subscriber removed.

Those rows are what an issue report counts. They carry whether the message was delivered, whether it was opened, how many links were clicked and whether it led to an unsubscribe, and after a deletion they carry all of that with nobody attached to it. The daily figures behind your growth chart are separate again: they are counts taken at the time and are not recalculated when a subscriber goes.

The reason to keep them is that an issue which went to 4,182 people went to 4,182 people. If deleting a reader rewrote history, every report you have would quietly change whenever somebody exercised their rights, your open and click rates would drift downwards for reasons nothing in the product could explain, and a sponsor you had already sent figures to would find different ones. Keeping the count and dropping the name gets both halves right, which is the same trade the data Issue Mint holds makes everywhere else.

The cost of that trade is worth saying: the deleted reader’s own issue history goes with them. The send log rows can be counted, but they can no longer be traced back to a person, so there is no way to ask what one deleted subscriber received.

What deleting does not undo

Two records sit outside the subscriber row and are unaffected.

The suppression list is one. If the address hard bounced or reported an issue as spam, that fact belongs to the address rather than to your list, and deleting the subscriber does not clear it. Adding the same address again afterwards will be refused, which surprises people and is the correct behaviour: a dead mailbox stays dead, and a person who reported you has not changed their mind by being deleted.

Refused addresses are the other. Those never became subscribers in the first place, so there is nothing about them for this action to remove, and they age out on their own schedule.

Deleting is not unsubscribing

The two actions answer different requests and it is worth not mixing them up.

An unsubscribed reader stays on your list, visibly, with their history intact and the date they left recorded. That is what you want in almost every case: it documents that they asked to stop, it stops you adding them again by accident, and it feeds the unsubscribe figures on your reports. A deleted reader leaves no such trace, so nothing stops the same address being imported again next year, which is exactly why deletion should be the answer to an erasure request rather than a tidying habit.

What it changes about your plan

Deleting an active subscriber reduces the count that decides what you pay.

Your plan follows the number of active subscribers across every newsletter on the account, so a large clear-out shows up there. It moves on its own rather than waiting for you to ask, and it moves down as well as up: how plan changes happen covers the timing, and the price ladder shows where each boundary sits. Unsubscribed, bounced, complained and pending rows were never in that count, so deleting those changes nothing about your bill.