Sendy tracked some unsubscribed even though I didn't use unsubscribe tag

TheAthenA714

Hello guys!

I've bought Sendy a couple of days ago and used it to send a first small-ish newsletter to test the system, and it worked really well. I had a little surprise however:

I work on a website which has a mailing list in our database. We already used other newsletter services before, so we already had our own unsubscribe page integrated to our website ready to go. So when I tried Sendy I decided to remove the <unsubscribe> tag completely from the newsletter and instead put a good old fashioned link to our own unsubscribe page. I know we can put a custom url to redirect users after the Sendy unsubscribe page, but since it was just a test I wanted to go to the simplest solution (we plan on integrating Sendy fully using it's API to synchronize Sendy's list with our own mailing list later). It worked really well when we sent the newsletter, our own custom unsubscribe link worked perfectly and the newsletter was sent smoothly.

Of course since we used our own custom link for unsubscription, it wasn't tracked by Sendy as an unsubscribed event, it was just tracked like all the other links in the newsletter. But to my surprise, we actually had 3 unsubscription events tracked by Sendy (on about 3500 emails opened). To put it into perspective, we had about 170 clicks on our own unsubscribe link. And to make matters "worse", none of those 3 users were unsubscribed by our system. So they didn't click the unsubscription link in the newsletter (fortunately we can correct this ourselves). They were unsubscribed from Sendy's list however.

So I'm a bit puzzled by that. Any idea how Sendy tracked those 3 mysterious unsubscription? How could the user do it since there was no <unsubscribe> link in the newsletter?

I'm not really worried about all of that, once we'll integrate with Sendy's API we'll have no problem synchronizing the subscription status of our users, but I'm just curious.

And to piggy-back on this, is there anyway to tag our own unsubscribe link to tell Sendy what it is so that the stats will be tracked accordingly? Or do we have to use the <unsubscribe> tag to do it and redirect to our own unsubscription page afterwards?

Ben

Hi,

These users are probably technically savvy users who viewed the raw source of the email and retrieved Sendy’s unsubscribe link in the ‘List-Unsubscribe’ header. Then used the link to unsubscribe. I use this method sometimes to unsubscribe from newsletters.

Also, Gmail will display an unsubscribe link natively at the top of the email using the unsubscribe link from the ‘List-Unsubscribe’ header as the unsubscribe source. When clicked, the person will be unsubscribe from your Sendy list.

Thanks.

Best regards,
Ben