Handling Unsubscribe Requests

Your mailing list can be set up to automatically remove subscribers upon their request. This happens when the program receives a special message (called an “opt-out request”). The message usually says something along the lines of UNSUBSCRIBE or REMOVE ME and is sent either by the person that wants to be removed, by an “unsubscribe” web form, or a special link.

Unsubscribe Tab

To bring up the “Unsubscribe” tab, double-click the mailing list icon, and click the tab.

To add support for unsubscribe requests, mark the check box labeled “Enable unsubscribe by email”.

Mail Filter

You can click the “Mail Filter” button to tell the program how a message must look like to be recognized as an unsubscribe request. For instance, you may require that the subject of such message must say "UNSUBSCRIBE" or that it must be sent to a certain email address (e.g. remove@yourdomain.com). To learn more, read the section entitled User-Defined Mail Filters.

Actions

Mark one or more check boxes grouped under the “Actions” label to define what happens after someone opts out.

You can tell the program to send back a reply to the unsubscribe request; simply mark the “Reply with a message” check box, and click the “message” link to compose the message. To find out about creating and editing messages, read this chapter: Composing Mail Messages.

Hint: Use one or more of the following fields in messages configured under "Actions" to reference the subscriber details:

The program can send predefined notifications to one or more email addresses whenever someone unsubscribes (“Send a new message to one or more email addresses”). Read this section to find out more: Sending a Message When New Mail Arrives.

You can also forward unsubscribe requests to a list of recipients  (“Forward the original message to one or more email addresses”).        

To make sure no more messages of any sort are sent from FollowUpExpert to somebody who opts out from this mailing list, turn on the option labeled “Add the sender to the list of blocked email addresses” (to find out more, read: Blocking Certain Email Addresses).

If you want to subscribe the sender to one or more other mailing lists, mark the option labeled “Add the sender to other mailing lists”, click the “mailing lists” link, select one or more lists, and click “OK”.

Parsing Unsubscribe Requests

By default, email addresses of people who want to unsubscribe are taken from From lines of the incoming unsubscribe requests. If you want to take the addresses (or other information such as names) from the text of the messages (or, in some rare cases, from the headers), use the “Form/Parsing” button. You can also click the "Mail Settings" tab, and turn on the option labeled "Default sender email address is in Reply-To: header" to tell the program to take the email addresses from the Reply-To lines (and only if the Reply-To line is not present -- from the From line). To learn more read this: Extracting Text from Messages

You can use the extracted text in the "Good Bye" reply to an unsubscribe request. See Message Personalization (Mail Merge).