Anti-spam regulations require you to include an unsubscribe option in emails sent by your marketing lists. This unsubscribe option is usually located at the bottom of your emails. A list-unsubscribe header is a snippet recognized by many popular email providers that adds an unsubscribe to your email’s headers. This makes it far easier for users to unsubscribe to your lists.
Warning: Not honoring unsubscribe requests can be extremely damaging to your reputation and puts you in danger of preventing your emails from reaching their destination.
Add a list-unsubscribe header
Site Mailer allows you to easily add a list unsubscribe header to the emails it sends out to your lists.
To add a list-unsubscribe header:
- Go to WP Admin.
- Navigate to Settings>Site Mailer.
- Click General Settings.
- Scroll down to the Add list-unsubscribe headers section.
- Toggle Add list-unsubscribe headers on.
Emails sent by Site Mailer will include a list-unsubscribe header.
When users click unsubscribe, their email will be added to your list of suppressed emails.
To find out more about manually adding and deleting users from the list of suppressed emails, see Manage suppressed email addresses.
How do list-unsubscribe headers work?
There are two types of list unsubscribe headers:
- Web unsubscribe: When a user clicks Unsubscribe, a post is sent to a URL. If you are using list-unsubscribe headers, Site Mailer sets up this URL and automatically adds the address to the list of suppressed emails.
- Email unsubscribe: When a user clicks Unsubscribe, an email notification is sent to the email address you registered with Site Mailer. You will then have to manually add their email address to the list of suppressed emails. For details on how to manually add email addresses to the suppressed list, see Managed suppressed emails.
Why use list-unsubscribe headers?
Although it may seem counterintuitive, giving list members an easy way to unsubscribe actually benefits you:
- Visibility: Some of the largest email providers, such as gmail, yahoo and apple mail, are adopting list-unsubscribe headers as their standard. This may mean that mail without this feature may be classified as junk mail by email providers.
- Reputation: Recipients who want to unsubscribe but can’t find the link may get frustrated and simply mark your mail as spam. Recipients marking your mail as spam can hurt your reputation and lead to your emails ending up in spam folders.
