Problem with Wiki / Bug Genie mails (SendGrid)

I'm sending this to the list in case anyone has thoughts on the problem. I
had a quick chat with Doug (shepazu) about it and we agreed to gather some
feedback.

 

Currently all our mails, whether generated by the Wiki or Bug Genie or any
other application, are sent through SendGrid (a cloud email infrastructure).
All those mails automatically get an "unsubscribe" link appended, which,
when clicked, will add the user's mail-address to the unsubscribe list of
our SendGrid account. Future Web Platform mails to addresses on that list
won't be delivered.

 

Now the problem is, every mail contains that link and there is no separate
list per application, the list is shared for all applications that use our
SendGrid account. That means once unsubscribed, a user would never get
another mail from Web Platform.

 

Case in point, out of curiosity I clicked on that unsubscribe link in a mail
from Bug Genie some time ago and was instantly "unsubscribed" (no
confirmation button on the page). Today I created an account in our test
Wiki install, but the confirmation mail didn't arrive. After wondering why,
I remembered clicking that link and tried to re-subscribe. I couldn't find a
way on the SendGrid page to do that. I had to log into our account and
manually remove me from the unsubscribe list. After re-sending the
confirmation mail it arrived instantly.

 

The problems are that a) the unsubscribe occurs instantly without warning
and b) it's valid for all our applications. A user might click on that
unsubscribe link easily and has no chance to re-subscribe, maybe he just
wanted to unsubscribe from Bug Genie. Some of our mails already do include
an unsubscribe link or info about unsubscribing on their own (the social
Wiki profile mails like messages or friend requests), some don't.

 

So the questions are:

1.       Should we remove the unsubscribe link (there is a setting on
SendGrid for this)?

2.       There are currently 34 unsubscribed addresses (mostly from October
and then like 1-3 per month). Should we mail them, telling them we made some
changes (if 1. = yes) and ask them if they really intended to unsubscribe?

3.       We also got some spam reports (people reporting our mails to their
ISP as spam, they also won't receive future mails), 3 in October and 1 in
early November. Also mail them like 2.?

 

My votes are 1. yes, 2. dunno, 3. no. I don't know how serious others are
about unsubscribe info. Personally, I like having a link in automatically
generated mails, but I also know that I can log in to whatever site and
disable those mails there. Having a link to unsubscribe from all
applications with no possibility to re-subscribe (or did I just miss it?) is
rather unfortunate, though.

 

Thoughts, votes?

 

 

-fro