Unsubscribing

Every issue carries an unsubscribe link, whether it goes out on hosted sending or through your own sending account, and clicking it unsubscribes the reader there and then. There is no confirmation step to get wrong and no login, because a reader who has decided to leave and cannot manage it is a reader who reports you as spam instead.

What the reader sees

A short page on your newsletter’s own address, confirming they have gone and naming the newsletter they have left.

The wording is plain: they will not receive it again, and no hard feelings. The page names your newsletter rather than printing the reader’s email address back at them, which reads better and avoids a specific technical failure: the proxy in front of reader-facing pages rewrites any address it finds in a page, and the script that would put the real one back is blocked by the security policy those pages run under, so an address there can end up showing as a placeholder.

The undo button

Underneath the confirmation is a Resubscribe me button, and it puts them straight back to active.

It is there because the unsubscribe happens on sight. A mis-click, a link followed out of curiosity, or a reader who meant to open the archive instead all end up unsubscribed, and the undo is what makes that recoverable in one click rather than through an email to you. Pressing it twice is harmless. The one thing it cannot undo is a hard bounce or a spam complaint, because those are facts about a mailbox and a relationship rather than a choice, and a click does not reverse either.

One-click unsubscribe in the mail client

Some readers never see the page at all, because their mail app offers its own unsubscribe button at the top of the message.

Issue Mint supports the standard behind that on every issue, which means the mail client can act on the reader’s behalf without them loading anything. Gmail and Apple Mail both show that button, and mailbox providers increasingly expect senders to support it, so it is on by default and there is nothing to configure. The footer every issue carries covers what else goes down there.

Why there is no preference centre

Issue Mint has no page where a reader picks topics, changes frequency or pauses for a month. The choice is in or out.

That is a real limitation and worth stating plainly rather than dressing up. A newsletter here is one list with one publishing schedule, so there are no topics to pick between and no frequency to lower. If you genuinely need two audiences, run two newsletters and let people subscribe to the one they want, which keeps the analytics separate as well as the sending. The other half of the answer is that a preference centre is often a delaying tactic dressed as a service, and a reader who wanted to leave and was offered a form instead is the reader who clicks the spam button next time.

How an unsubscribe is attributed to an issue

The unsubscribe link in each issue carries the identifier of that reader’s row in that issue’s send log, so the departure is counted against the issue that prompted it.

That is what fills in the unsubscribes figure on an issue report and the per-issue column on your dashboard. Three details are worth knowing. It counts once per reader per issue, so a mail scanner following the link and the reader following it afterwards do not both register. Pressing the undo button takes the count back down, so an issue is not permanently blamed for somebody who changed their mind thirty seconds later. And a link with the identifier stripped off, or one copied from somebody else’s email, still unsubscribes the right person but is attributed to nothing, which is the safe way round.

Unsubscribing somebody yourself

You can unsubscribe people from the subscriber list, one at a time or in bulk by selecting rows.

Doing it there sets the status and the date and is not attributed to any issue, since no issue caused it. It is the right action for somebody who replied asking to be taken off, and it is reversible in the sense that they can sign up again, though not by a button on your side. The alternative, deleting them outright, removes their details rather than marking them as gone, and is the one to use when somebody asks you to erase what you hold rather than to stop emailing them.