Skip to content
Letterhead Letterhead Letterhead Help Center
Admin Tools

What Happens When Someone Unsubscribes From Your Newsletter?

Edit in CMS

Letterhead keeps the unsubscribe process simple while adhering to relevant compliance laws.

How the unsubscribe process works

Section titled “How the unsubscribe process works”

When someone clicks unsubscribe at the bottom of one of your newsletters, their status changes to Unsubscribed immediately — there’s no processing delay.

They stay in your audience — audience members can’t be deleted, which prevents accidental re-subscription and keeps you CAN-SPAM compliant.

One caveat: a newsletter that had already been handed off for delivery before the reader clicked unsubscribe can still land in their inbox — that’s a separate in-flight delivery, not a delay in processing the unsubscribe itself.

Leaving everything in one step

Section titled “Leaving everything in one step”

Readers who manage their subscriptions from your email preferences page can leave every newsletter you send them at once, instead of unchecking each one.

  1. On the preferences page, the reader selects Unsubscribe from everything.
  2. They’re asked to confirm. Selecting Yes, unsubscribe me from everything unsubscribes them; Cancel leaves everything as it was.
  3. The page confirms that they’ve been unsubscribed from every newsletter you send them.

What this covers:

  • It applies to the newsletters that reader receives from your company and that the preferences page already lists for them. It doesn’t change anyone else’s subscriptions.
  • Their contact profile records that they chose to leave everything, and when. See View suppression status and reasons on a contact profile.
  • If the reader later signs up again through one of your signup forms, that record is cleared and they’re subscribed to the newsletter they chose. Re-subscribing a contact yourself, or importing them, doesn’t clear it.

Common issues when unsubscribing

Section titled “Common issues when unsubscribing”
  • Wrong email address — the reader must unsubscribe with the same address they subscribed with.
  • Still receiving emails after unsubscribing — since the status change is immediate, a newsletter arriving afterward is most often one that was already in flight when they clicked unsubscribe. If it keeps happening, double-check the address or contact our support team.
  • Error message from a test email — the unsubscribe link in a test email always shows an error page, because the person you sent the test to isn’t a subscriber. That’s expected in a test, not a fault. To check the link for real, subscribe your own address and send to a segment that contains only you.
  • Error message — if a reader hits an error from a real send, reach out to support.
Section titled “Related”

Still can’t find what you need? Contact support.