Managing your subscriber base is an instrumental component of sending successful emails, and here at Sendgrid we give you an variety of tools to help you effectively trim down lists and campaigns. Unsubscribes are controlled in 2 major ways within your account, using the Unsubscribe suppression list and within your Newsletter Recipient lists.

Email Reports > Unsubscribes

When you enable the Subscription Tracking App from within your 'Apps' section, an Unsubscribe Footer will be appended to the bottom of your outgoing SMTP emails containing an opt-out link. Users who click on these links will be immediately added to the Unsubscribes list, and subsequent emails sent to these users will be automatically Dropped to keep those users from receiving any further messages.

You can also manually add addresses to this list if you need to, and keep in mind that all aspects of this particular process can be controlled via the Unsubscribe API.

Newsletter Recipient List Unsubscribes

When Sending using our Newsletter App, we automatically include an Unsubscribe link at the bottom of all outgoing mail, which you'll see in the Design step when creating a Newsletter.

When you send to a recipient list you've created within our Newsletter App, users who click the Unsubscribe link in these messages are suppressed in much the same way as normal Unsubscribes, but it is important to note that these are list-specific unsubscribes.

For example, if a recipient Unsubscribes from a Newsletter when you are sending using Recipient List A, sending to Recipient List B, which contains the same recipient address will NOT result in the address being supressed. This is by design, in that if you are sending multiple types of Newsletters, users do not inadvertantly unsubscribe from everything, just the Newsletter they happen to be viewing.

Unsubscribes can easily be applied from list to list using the Manage Unsubscribes feature in conjunction with the Export function.

When using the Export function from a list, you can elect to export only a list of Unsubscribed emails, this will download locally to your computer as a .CSV. 

After exporting Unsubscribes from one list, you can use the Manage Unsubscribes feature within another list and upload these previously opt-ed out recipients from any mailings using your new list. 

And that's it! All the Unsubscribed addresses recorded on List A are now part of List B's internal Unsubscribe suppression list.

FAQS:

Does Newsletter have a 'master' list of unsubscribes?  Not currently, but you can export a list of all Unsubscribes logged across all recipient lists from the Manage Unsubscribes page.

After downloading this CSV, you can upload it to any existing Recipient List using the above step.

I'm building a Newsletter in the App using my own HTML, how do I manually include the unsubscribe link?  When using the Newsletter HTML editor, use the tag [unsubscribe] in your content to place the link.

e.g. <a href="[unsubscribe]">click here to unsubscribe</a>

You can also do a cursor insert using the button on the HTML editor toolbar as shown below.