Unsubscribe Link

The unsubscribe link is your ally and should be present in every email, whether transactional or mass mailing. Anti-spam systems take it into account when deciding if the letter is SPAM, and if the link is missing, an addressee might issue a SPAM complaint instead of simply unsubscribing, which is bad for your sender reputation. For these reasons UniOne appends an unsubscribe block to every email.

Default unsubscribe footer in UniOne

The unsubscribe footer contains a reference to the original target address (so that the reader always knows the correct address even if the email has been redirected a few times) as well as the unsubscribe link which leads to an unsubscribe page with a neutral visual theme. The language of both the unsubscribe footer and unsubscribe page is set by the corresponding API call URI, or by the "global_language" parameter found in the X-UNIONE header if the email is sent with SMTP. Languages supported for now: be, de, en, es, fr, it, pl, pt, ru, ua.

In addition to the visible unsubscribe footer, UniOne also adds the List-Unsubscribe email header which provides a link for instant unsubscribing. Many email clients and services make use of this header by adding an Unsubscribe button.

UniOne keeps track of all unsubscribed addresses and will deny sending any further emails to them. To find out whether a particular address is unsubscribed, you may use the suppression/get API method for a particular address, or the suppression/list method  to obtain the full list of unsubscribed addresses (where "cause"="unsubscribed"). Alternatively, you may use your personal account on the Email search page to manually lookup an address. You can reset the 'unsubscribed' status via suppression/delete API method, or manually using the Email Search page, or by sending a new invitation email with email/subscribe method.

Customizing the design

You have the option to adjust the placement and appearance of the unsubscribe link according to your requirements. You only need to insert the link into your email body wherever you wish. The exact link format depends on the template engine you are using. You currently have two options to choose from:

In most cases, you may also need to disable the default unsubscribe footer, in order to avoid unnecessary duplication (see below for instructions). The same applies if you are creating your own customized unsubscribe page and add the corresponding link to your emails. In this case you need to implement such a page on your own site, and you are also taking the responsibility of processing unsubscribe requests.

Disabling the unsubscribe link

In order to cancel adding our unsubscribe footer to all or some of your emails, you will need to contact our tech support. Depending on your mailing volumes and usage statistics this may also require signing an additional responsibility agreement with your company.

The following two options are available:

  • If you need to disable the unsubscribe link for certain emails only ('dynamic' disabling), you may do this by adding the skip_unsubscribe parameter to your email/send API request (or to X-UNIONE header of SMTP request). This removes both the unsubscribe footer and List-Unsubscribe header.
  • It is also possible to disable adding the default unsubscribe link to all of your emails, regardless of the skip_unsubscribe parameter ('forced' disabling). In this case, the List-Unsubscribe header will still be added, but you will be able to replace it with your own, see details below.

You need to select one of the above options while placing your support request. We recommend using dynamic disabling as the most flexible option.

The List-Unsubscribe header value may be set by using the options.unsubscribe_url parameter of the email/send method. We strongly advise that you do not neglect this possibility. It is also recommended that the link cancels the addressee's subscription directly, without further confirmation -- this is required for proper support by many email clients such as Gmail.

As mentioned above, if our unsubscribe link is disabled, you take the sole responsibility of processing unsubscribe requests. To maintain good delivery rates, be sure to never send emails to unsubscribed addresses. If you would prefer to double check this, be sure to call the suppression/set method with "cause"="unsubscribed" for each unsubscribe request you process; the addresses will be tagged as unsubscribed on our side too.

Projects and unsubscribe links

Projects are a convenient way of managing subscriptions with different themes. If an addressee unsubscribes from a particular project, it does not affect his/her subscription to other projects.

If you are already using the unsubscribe link disabling, you may disable it for a certain project while not disabling for other ones:

  • If you set custom_unsubscribe_url_enabled=true using either project/create or project/update methods, an unsubscribe link will be added to all emails for this project regardless of the skip_unsubscribe value.
  • If you set custom_unsubscribe_url_enabled=false, an unsubscribe link will not be added if skip_unsubscribe=1 (however it will be added by default if the parameter is omitted); note that this case requires dynamic disabling of the unsubscribe link.
  • If custom_unsubscribe_url_enabled parameter is not set for a new project, it will be inherited from the global account settings. You can later change the setting using the project/update method.