Home Articles Making Unsubscription Easy Comments	Articles   About KB

Comments From Readers

---

Email Notifications: Making Unsubscription Easy by Kristoffer Bohmann

Unsubscribing email newsletters and other email notification services can be an unpleasant and time-consuming experience. Most unsubscribe problems can be avoided by making the subscribers email visible and linking to an unsubscribe page in all emails.

---

How to Include Unsubscribe Info in Email Newsletters

Magnus Nilsson from Mondial Portabla Media in Stockholm, Sweden, comments:

I just read your article Email Notifications: Making Unsubscription Easy and have one question. You write "The problem is fixed by including this information: 'You are subscribed as john@doe.com'." This is a good suggestion, but I don't know how to make it run on, for example, a newsletter service provided by an ordinary web hosting company... or if you run your list in your own e-mail programme. Do you address only people with their own web servers and programmers, or am I missing something?

Kristoffer Bohmann answers:

You can use Word and Excel (or Access) to create a simple system of your own.

1. Collect all subscriber emails in the column Subscriber_Email in an Excel spreadsheet (or Access database).
2. Create new Word document for your newsletter. Mail Merge your newsletter with the Excel spreadsheet by selecting Mail Merge in Word's Tools menu. A window opens, now press Main Document : Create : Form Letters : Active Window. This transforms your newsletter to a Mail Merge document. In Data Source, press Get Data : Open Data Source and select your Excel spreadsheet. Your newsletter is now merged with your subscriber emails.
3. Write your newsletter in Word. Insert this line in your newsletter document: 'You are subscribed as {Subscriber_Email chosen from Insert Merge Field)}'.
4. Press Merge and then Merge to electronic email. You can edit header in Setup.

Keep up the good work...

Riva Saker from Miami, Florida, writes:

This is my first visit to your website and I'm impressed. I like your explanations, especially the step-by-step routines for completing tasks. Keep up the good work.

Never provide error messages when using e-mail addresses as user names

Chris Olejak writes:

I read your article about e-mail unsubscribe and agree with everything but your suggestion to provide an error message if the e-mail address entered is not in the database. Doing this could create a privacy issue where someone could enter someone else's e-mail address to determine if that person is a customer of the site. The lack of an error message appearing after the entry of an e-mail address provides enough information to determine that the owner of the e-mail address has used the site/service. On the Web site I work on, we provide the same confirmation page regardless if the e-mail address was in our database or not. I look forward to checking out your site often.

Kristoffer Bohmann answers:

I agree.