CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I will bump this!  For all we know, we've had this issue before now, but just today we got an email from a list subscriber who has this issue-- he was opted out but doesn't know why.  Looking at his activity, I cannot be sure, but based on the email to him getting opened 137 times he clearly forwarded to a lot of people and someone clicked "opt out".

I have seen when un-subscribing from some mailing lists that the user gets a page with his email address partially obscured (e.g. a*****@freedomlives.net) and he is asked to fill in the email address to opt out.

It would be a nice feature to have-- the option to require the user to input his email address before unsubscribing to prevent users from being accidentally unsubscribed after they forward newsletters.

The good thing is that the list-unsubscribe header gets ignored by gmail if forwarded.

In some countries a 2-step unsubscribe process will not comply with the anti-SPAM laws.  It must be a 1-step process.

Shouldn't it be enough to have the unsubscribe page specify which email address will be unsubscribed?

I suspect that most people who end up unsubscribing the original recipient when an email is forwarded to them do it accidentally rather than deliberately.  Probably they are trying to make sure that they don't get any more newsletters forwarded to them, not trying to stop the original recipient from getting the email.  (The exception may be if the original recipient has been asked not to forward on the emails but keeps doing it anyway - in which case they deserve to be unsubscribed IMO.)

I think you missed the main point of my last post. (I also didn't say that I am sure this issue has been considered before and no easy fail-safe 'solution' exists.)

Yes, anyone who receives the forwarded message can unsubscribe the original recipient. 

My point was that if it is clear who is being unsubscribed it unlikely that the forwarded recipient will unsubscribe the original recipient even if they have the ability to do so.

Let's think about how the forwarding process should be used...

John receives a email form his favourite NFP  (newsletter, notice of an event, request for money etc).  He thinks his friends will be interested in it so he forwards it to another twenty people.  These twenty people will know who John is (the feature is Tell a Friend, not Spam a list of people you don't really know).

Some of these twenty people think " I'm glad John keeps sending me this info, it is really interesting"; some think "Ah, John trying to change the world again, I'll just ignore the email"; one person thinks "I am sick of getting these emails about this NFP, how can I stop getting them? Ah, an  unsubscribe link... "

What happens next will depend on what is on the page reached by that link... 

If all it says is "Are you sure you want to opt out?" then John will be unsubscribed by his friend. (My understanding is that this doesn't count as a two stage process as the person can answer the question immediately with a simple click of the button.)

If it says something like:  "Are you sure you want to unsubscribe the email address john@hisEmail.com.au?" then the friend will think "No, I don't want to unsubscribe John, I just don't want him to forward these emails to me, I'll ask him to stop."

That is how the feature should work, so for most legitimate uses of the Tell a Friend feature John remains subscribed to the emails and his friends are happy (the ones who read it, the ones who ignore it and the one who has asked John to stop forwarding the emails because John complies with that request.)



 

Hi,

I discussed it earlier on in this forum, but there is a magic css class trick that allows you to hide a sentence/link when you see a forwarded link.
http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-12032

I haven't tried nor investigated, for what I recall it did work on outlook at least (in my experience, the higher % of not too tech savvy users in outlook users). Would be awesome you find that out and let us know how it worked.

X+

Thanks for this info and for participating in this discussion.

I think that the best solution would be that some tokens (unsubscribe + opt-out) are not processed by civi when the user uses the civi forward to friends URL.

Another potential solution would be to improve the email opt-out process to actually check that the email address of the sender matches the address of the person to be unsubscribed.

Quote from: nant on March 14, 2014, 12:47:02 am

I think that the best solution would be that some tokens (unsubscribe + opt-out) are not processed by civi when the user uses the civi forward to friends URL.

When I had the problem mentioned, it was a recipient that forwarded manually the email from within the mail client, so no way to civi to know if it's before of after a forward

Well I still think that the civi forwarding functionality should improve on this.

At least you can give your recipients an option.

Please use our forwarding link and form in order to not give your fowarders the ability to opt you out.

In 4.5 there is a change to this - see https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-11302