Unsubscribe & Preferences

Every marketing email from Mailcrate gives recipients two ways out: a one-click unsubscribe button in their mail app, and an unsubscribe link in the email that opens a preference page. Both are required by Gmail and Yahoo for bulk senders, and by anti-spam laws such as CAN-SPAM and GDPR.

One-click unsubscribeCopy Anchor Link

Mailcrate adds the standard List-Unsubscribe headers to every marketing email. Mail apps such as Gmail, Yahoo and Apple Mail use them to show an Unsubscribe button next to your sender name. When a recipient uses it:

• If the email belonged to a subscription group, the recipient is opted out of that group only.
• Otherwise, including when the email's group has since been archived, the contact is unsubscribed from all marketing email.

Transactional email, such as receipts and password resets, doesn't carry these headers and isn't affected.

The unsubscribe link and postal addressCopy Anchor Link

Every marketing email needs a visible unsubscribe link and your physical mailing address. Mailcrate never adds a footer for you, so both are part of your email's design:

• New emails start with a footer containing an Unsubscribe link and your postal address.
• If you write your own footer, link to the {{ unsubscribe_url }} merge tag and include the {{ sender_address }} merge tag. In a React Email template, use the unsubscribeUrl and sender_address props.
• {{ sender_address }} fills in the Mailing address from Settings → Workspace → General. Until you set one, it renders empty and the settings menu flags it.
• The email editor warns you when an email has no unsubscribe link or postal address.

The link is unique to each recipient, so they don't need to log in, and it doesn't expire.

Checks before a campaign sendsCopy Anchor Link

A campaign's Review step checks for both. If the unsubscribe link or postal address is missing, sending asks you to confirm before it goes ahead. Mailcrate warns but never blocks, so it is up to you to fix it. For React Email templates the check is a best-effort scan of the compiled template, so it can occasionally miss a link that is there.

The preference pageCopy Anchor Link

What the link opens depends on your workspace:

• If your workspace has active subscription groups, a page titled Email preferences lists every active group with its description, with a switch for each. The group the current email belongs to is labelled This email. The recipient switches off the topics they don't want and chooses Save preferences. Unsubscribe from all, below it, stops all marketing email after a confirmation.
• If it has none, the page asks a single question, whether to unsubscribe the address from all emails, with an Unsubscribe from all emails button.
• If the contact is already unsubscribed, the page just confirms it: You have been unsubscribed. Recipients can't resubscribe themselves from this page.

The page shows the recipient's address partly masked, so a forwarded email doesn't reveal it in full.

The page uses your workspace's branding, and can be served from your own domain; set that up under Settings → Mail Setup → Hosted pages.

What happens when someone unsubscribesCopy Anchor Link

When a contact unsubscribes from everything, by any route:

1. Their status changes to Unsubscribed.
2. Mailcrate records a durable, marketing-only opt-out for the address, which appears on the suppression list with the reason unsubscribe. It survives even if the contact is deleted and imported again, so an old CSV can't quietly resubscribe them.
3. They still receive transactional email, because those messages are about something they did, not marketing.
4. An unsubscribe event fires, which journeys and webhooks can react to.

Unsubscribed contacts can stay in your segments and lists; they are simply skipped whenever marketing email sends.

ResubscribingCopy Anchor Link

A contact can be resubscribed from the actions menu on their page in Contacts, with Resubscribe. That also clears their unsubscribe record from the suppression list. It doesn't lift a bounce or complaint suppression, which you'd have to remove separately. Only do this when the person has asked to receive email again; unsubscribing is their decision, and mailing someone who opted out is both illegal in many countries and a fast route to spam complaints.

Opt-outs from individual subscription groups can be changed on the contact's page under Subscription preferences.