many users unsubscribed without asking

[lists]

Hello,

thanks a lot for your plugin, I've been using it for 8 years, sending two or three newletters per year and it has been great !

Unfortunately, while sending the most recent newsletter, the system seems to have quite randomly unsubscribed 10% of my users (I have appr. 1500 people inscribed, and now I have around 150 'unsubscribed' people more than I remember I had).

Symptoms are:
- people get back to me about receiving "goodbye" emails without unsubscribing
- many more people of my list are now marked as 'unsubscribed', many of which that I know would be unlikely to do so
- I saw at least one provider reporting the "goodbye" email was sent to an adress that doesn't exist anymore, which in this case I happen to know to be true since it is a person that left an organization. It seems to me that this is a pretty clear indication that the unsubscribing is not due to any user interaction or an agressive spam response, but to something internal to the mailing engine ?
- I see no pattern to the adresses that were unsubscribed, I know the majority of the people on my mailing list and of those that were unsubscribed: I see some gmail, some are from organizations that I know use a microsoft business environment, some are self-hosted, really a mixed bunch, representative of my subscribers..

I would be very happy to assist in finding the cause of this, even though I will be travelling most of the coming week and not super easily available. Is there a way to retrieve the list without the spontaneous unsubscribes ? Is there a change log of some kind so that I could roll back the changes to my list of the last 24h ?

Please let me know what information you would need.

My subscribe page is here: http://www.joostrekveld.net/?page_id=1423

With kind regards,

Joost.

[Stefano]

Hi, you're not alone, this is something that started to be a problem (not only for our plugin but generally for all email platforms) at the beginning of 2024.
We analyzed many of those situations and almost always, the unsubscription was started by a system on a data center, "masking" the request as if it had been started from a real browser.

We think they are Mail Scanners trying to grab info from the links in newsletters. Even our antibot was not effective (we use the same techniques that are widely implemented even by big brands).

What to do: since you have an old installation, probably you have the old default settings and they're less protective against this problem.

Go to the unsubscription configuration page of our plugin, and revert the "confirm" message you should see as customized) to the default one. You'll see on the default message the link to confirm the unsubscription is no longer present and there is instead a shortcode like "newsletter_unsubscribe_button". That generates a button that is much harder for mail scanners to follow.

Hope this helps, you may consider setting as confirmed the email addresses that have been unsubscribed.

[lists]

Hello Stefano, thanks for the prompt answer and explanation. What a world ! So this seems to be collateral damage of the spam arms race, making it hard for real people to keep their systems going....

I will follow your instructions, hoping it will work better next time...
Keep up the good work and kind regards,
Joost.

[lists]

Hello Stefano,
I just received a message that one of my test adresses on my own domain was unsubscribed from my mailing list, which makes me rethink what you wrote.
My domain is hosted by a fairly small, independent-minded, open-source driven hosting company, and I would be really surprised they would use anti-spam systems that automatically attempt to unsubscribe. But then again, even they probably outsource their anti-spam machinery to some extent.. pfff.

[Stefano]

Hi, to check that specific case, enter the details of your test subscriber and you have a "log" panel.
You should see the unsubscription event with an IP address. Can you send it to me? We can check where this IP address is used and maybe we can find more info!

[lists]

Hello, sorry, I don't find that 'log' panel ? where do I enter the details of my test subscriber ? On the subscribers 'search and edit' page ?

[Stefano]

Hi, form the list of your subscriber, "edit" your test subscriber and there you have the log panel.

[lists]

Thank you !
Right, I checked four addresses at the end of my subscribers list and whois tells me that all those four different IP addresses are registered with Microsoft. I have no idea why a microsoft IP adress would initiate a request to unsubscribe an email adress from an independent hosting company ? That is so weird...
But thanks again !

PS those IPs were 4.204.211.53, 52.138.177.89, 13.79.152.119, 52.236.180.47.

PPS: is there a 'bulk' way to inspect those logs ?

[Stefano]

Hi, later I checked it, but I assume it is Azure. I say that because 90% of the times the unsubscription started from azure.
Could be the provider uses an antispam service on Azure or the whole email service is there.

[Author]

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