Good or bad subscribers deletion practices

More info and questions on our use case:

In order to maintain a clean list, and, let’s be honest, stay under the 2000 subscribers limit, we listed the email addresses of people that didn’t come to a workshop we offer since many years ago.

We sent them a “goodbye” email, with the opportunity to subscribe again. Either by clicking the Manage Subscription Link inside the email, or using a form available on our website, or by physically coming to us so we can subscribe them ourselves.

On our first try, we moved these MailPoet subscribers to the trash and emptied it. As described in my first post.
Today we did another batch. I though I could do “Unsubscribe” as a Grouped action, but I could only “Remove from all lists” or “Move to trash”.
First option leaves people as “Subscribed” and doesn’t serve our purpose.
So we decided to move them to trash, where they are still listed as “Subscribed”.

Question is:
If they click on the Manage Subscription link and subscribe again, will they be added back as subscribers and moved out of the trash? What if they use the form on our website?

Thank you.

Hi @wpguillaume! Answering your question: they will be removed from the trash and will be subscribed again.

Hello @wysija,

I had subscribed a test e-mail address, and received the associated welcome e-mail.
I then moved it to the trash.

– If I click on the Manage subscription link in the Welcome e-mail, the address is still listed as “Subscribed” in the Manage subscription page.
– If I click “Register” (or is it “Save”, in English?), nothing happens, user stays in the trash.
– If I then change the state to “Unsubscribed” in the Manage subscription page and save, the user stays in the trash but is listed as “Unsubscribed”.
– And in the Manage subscription page, if I change the state back to “Subscribed” and save, the user is listed as “Subscribed”, but it still stays in the trash.

– Now if I use the Subscription form we put on our website, now, as you said, the user is moved out of the trash. The user receives the e-mail asking for confirmation, even though it is already listed as “Subscribed” and not “Unconfirmed”.
– If I move the user to the trash and, after that, they click the confirmation e-mail link, they get listed as “Subscribed”, but they are still in the trash.

I would expect:
– the same behavior of moving the user out of the trash when using the Manage subscription page
– seeing the user as “Unconfirmed” in the admin panel if they subscribe via the form, or not sending the confirmation email if they are listed as “Subscribed”
– clicking a confirmation e-mail link should add you back as Subscribed and out of the trash, or even create a previously deleted user, in all cases.

Ideally though, I think a Grouped action of “Unsubscribe” could be added. It could also be associated with a “Goodbye email”, matching the behavior of the Welcome e-mail.

That’s what we did manually, and plan on keep on doing with future Inactive users: When unsubscribing them, they get a last e-mail reading something like:

We’re sad you don’t read us anymore, but we don’t want to spam your inbox.
We’ll stop sending e-mails to you now, but please, feel free to come back!

Thank you for following up.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 11 months ago by wpguillaume. Reason: adding "click confirmation e-mail link" case

@wysija

In case of a tl;dr in my previous messages:

When a user is in the trash
– if they subscribe again using a form, they will be restored from trash, great.
– if they subscribe using the manage subscription link of any mail, or the link of a previous confirmation mail, they will stay in trash, not so great.

Thank you. ??

Hi @wpguillaume,

Just to make it clear:

– If you permanently delete a subscriber, they can subscribe again using the subscription form. They will be treated as any other new subscriber;

– It’s not possible to click twice on the same confirmation link from the confirmation mail;

– If the user has been moved to the Trash by the website admin, no matter what changes they do in the Manage Subscription page, they won’t be restored from the Trash until you manually do it from the plugin;

– Our recommendation is that you manually Unsubscribe the subscribers and leave them in the Trash if you no longer want to send to them. You can read more tips about managing your subscribers here.