One subscription per address - and a page that says who you can't email

Two things could disagree about whether somebody had unsubscribed, and only one of them stopped mail. That is now settled, and the answer has somewhere to live.

Subscription belongs to the address

A contact record is your filing of a person. The same human can be two records, and one record can hold a work address and a personal one - so consent sits on the mailbox, which is what receives the mail and what somebody clicked unsubscribe in. One opt-out stops mail to that address everywhere in your workspace, on every object it appears on. It does not opt out the other address on the same contact, which is deliberate: two mailboxes, two consents, and the record now shows both so it reads as a decision rather than a surprise.

List membership went back to being what it is - segmentation, and the record of how someone consented. It is no longer a second, quieter opt-out that could say "subscribed" about somebody who had asked you to stop.

Do not email

A new page under Marketing lists every address marketing is blocked to and why, with a count against each reason. Forty spam complaints and forty dead addresses are different problems and neither shows up in a campaign report; now both are on one screen.

You can add an address yourself. “Take me off your list” gets said on calls and in replies far more often than it gets clicked, and until now there was no way to act on it - removing someone from a list left them mailable from every other one. Anyone who can edit records can do it, from that page or from the Marketing card on the contact, and it comes off every list at once. Transactional email they asked for still goes out. Lifting a block stays with administrators, because that is the direction that can resume mail to someone who reported you.

The record answers “why didn’t they get my email?”

It used to take four places to work out: a list status, a suppression, a bounce tally, a sunsetting rule. The Marketing card now leads with the state of each address on the record, the reason in plain words, and the date.

Managing your subscription, from the recipient’s side

The preferences link in your emails is now a single clear switch - subscribed or not - unless you have deliberately published two or more lists for people to choose between. It used to be able to show a page reading “no subscription options are available for this address”, which was the default state for anyone who added the link without setting lists up, and is the worst possible version of offering someone a choice.

It is also the only place a re-subscribe exists, so the unsubscribe confirmation now points at it - for the people who mis-clicked, and the ones who only wanted less mail rather than none. Where several lists are on offer, clearing every box is now treated as unsubscribing from everything, which is what it looks like; previously it left you mailable.

Three fixes behind it

• Unsubscribing via a non-standard email field - a work or billing address rather than the default one - stopped the mail but left every list showing that person as subscribed. Every email field on every object is matched now, and case no longer matters.
• Automations and imports could re-add someone who had opted out, as long as they had no row on that particular list. The mail never went out, but the membership recorded consent on a day the person had said the opposite. Both check the address now, and an import reports how many were skipped for it.
• Asking whether an address is suppressed could return any one of several reasons at random. It now names the most serious one - so a dead mailbox is never reported to you as somebody’s choice to leave.