unsubscribe usability and line length

[pdonovan]

Experienced users of CiviMail may already realize this, but I've been struggling with some usability issues on the unsubscribe feature: How to get unsubscribe links in plain text bulk emails that are less than 65 characters so that the link doesn't break in commonly used email programs (a major and widespread usability problem). Here is one way.

I'm using CiviCrm 2.0.2 on Drupal 5.7. I use a profile with a Group(s) field in my Drupal registration, giving the option of joining a group mailing list with a checkbox. On the profile settings, all four boxes are checked in "Use for". Then, in my emails to a group, I can use this URL for them to unsubscribe by unchecking the box (provided they are logged in of course):

http://yoursite.org/civicrm/profile/edit?reset=1&gid=2

where gid= refers to the id of the profile.

Obviously this does not involve double opt out etc. but it does give users a usable link less than 65 characters. If others have found other solutions, I would be interested in knowing about them.

[Donald Lobo]

Can you please file an issue for this. There is an issue to fix VERP email addresses in 2.1 and i suspect we can combine the two fixes and use a db table to encode both the sub/unsub urls and the email addresss

lobo

[Piotr Szotkowski]

FWIW, the VERP issue is CRM-2574 and I just filed CRM-3009 for the above.

In the minimal approach, we could hack extern/url.php to act as a redirector which knows the long address of the (un-,re-)subscribe page. In VERP’s case, we do need to have the hash in the email address – its length and ‘randomness’ is a security feature.