Understanding unsubscribes and fixing member email delivery

Many Toastmost features for member communication and club marketing leverage email notifications and newsletters, leading club leaders to be concerned when members say “I’m not getting the club’s emails.” Often, this happens when a member is tagged in the database as having unsubscribed — whether they intended to, or not.

How do unintentional unsubscribes happen? A few scenarios include:

• The member clicked unsubscribe by accident.
• The member forwarded the message to someone else who clicked the unsubscribe link (coded to the first person’s address).
• An automated email security system clicked the unsubscribe link, trying to establish that it isn’t leading the member astray.

The last of these issues seems to arise with members who have a corporate email address associated with their member account.

Toastmost uses a cloud service called Postmark for email delivery because it helps handle issues with bad addresses, spam complaints, and unsubscribes. One issue with the Postmark unsubscribe feature is it doesn’t require further confirmation from the user after the unsubscribe link is clicked. The user who realizes they made a mistake can click “Re-subscribe” but automated system email security systems likely ignore that option. I think this design is meant to prevent recipients from having to “jump through hoops” to get unsubscribed, but unintentional unsubscribes appear to be a side-effect.

New email “bypass” option

If an email address has been repeatedly and erroneously unsubscribed from your mailing list, you can now add it to a new “bypass” list. Messages on that list are sent via an alternate method, rather than through Postmark, so that they will not be subject to unintentional unsubscribes.

You can also add or remove email addresses from the unsubscribed and blocked addresses list from the Unsubscribed List screen under RSVP Email Newsletters and Notifications.

Please try removing the address from the unsubscribed list first and only add it to the bypass list if that doesn’t work.

Note that spam complaints are more serious and can’t be removed through the use of this tool. You should not be spamming random email addresses, only sending email to people who have given their permission, including members of your club and people who have consented to be added to your email list.

If the person tells you they didn’t intentionally file a spam report, I can reach out to Postmark to have the spam block on that email removed, but that should be rare. Using the bypass list is another option, but, again, please use it responsibly. If toastmost.org were to be flagged as a spam domain, that would hurt every club that uses the platform.

If any email recipient wants to unsubscribe, we want to respect their wishes — and avoid getting labeled as spammers — but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be able to bypass those controls when they aren’t working.