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Your audience

Consent and unsubscribes

Permission, double opt-in, unsubscribes and suppression. Read this one.

This is the most important article in the manual. Getting consent right protects your recipients, your domain reputation, and you personally from regulatory action.

You are the sender

Nectazo provides the tools; you decide who gets contacted. Legally, that makes you responsible for having permission to email every person on your list, under whichever laws apply to you and to them — the Spam Act in Australia, CAN-SPAM in the United States, CASL in Canada, the GDPR in Europe and the UK.

What counts as permission

  • Someone filled in your signup form.
  • Someone bought from you and agreed to marketing at checkout.
  • Someone gave you their card at an event and knowingly agreed to be emailed.

What does not count:

  • A list you bought, rented or were given.
  • Addresses scraped from websites, directories or social media.
  • Addresses appended from a data broker.
  • Someone who emailed you once about something unrelated.

Double opt-in

Double opt-in asks new signups to confirm by clicking a link before they receive anything else. Turn it on per brand under Settings → Signups.

With it on:

  1. 1Someone signs up and is created as pending.
  2. 2They receive a confirmation email.
  3. 3Clicking the link makes them subscribed.
  4. 4Optionally, they then receive a welcome or confirmation email — useful for delivering a lead magnet.

Both emails are fully editable block documents, the same as any campaign, and start from a sensible built-in design.

It applies to signups, not imports

Double opt-in applies to form, API and plugin signups. Bulk CSV imports are treated as already-consented, because you are asserting that consent by importing them.

It applies to addresses that are new to the list

Somebody already subscribed proved their address the first time, so they are not asked again — they go straight to the confirmation email and whatever it delivers. Asking an existing subscriber to confirm a second time is a reliable way to lose them, and it re-opens a question they have already answered.

On an established list that is most of the people who fill in a form, so word the form's success message to be true either way. It also means testing a form with your own address will never show you the opt-in email — use one that has never signed up.

Unsubscribes

Every campaign must contain an unsubscribe link. The builder includes an unsubscribe block, and the link works without any setup on your part. Clicking it immediately sets the contact to unsubscribed and adds them to the brand's suppression list.

Do not remove or disable the unsubscribe link

It is a legal requirement in nearly every jurisdiction and a condition of using Nectazo.

Suppression

A suppression list records every address in a brand that must not be contacted. Addresses land there for one of these reasons:

ReasonSet when
UnsubscribedThe recipient clicked unsubscribe
ComplainedThe recipient marked a message as spam
BouncedDelivery failed permanently
ManualYou added the address yourself
No consentThe address only ever received transactional mail

Suppression is checked on every send and cannot be bypassed. Re-importing a suppressed address does not reactivate it.

Transactional email is different

A password reset is not marketing, and suppressing it would lock people out of their accounts. Transactional messages are delivered regardless of marketing consent — which is exactly why they must genuinely be transactional. See Transactional email.

Something unclear or wrong? Tell us and we'll fix it.

Consent and unsubscribes — Nectazo