Why company email filters unsubscribe your readers, and how to stop it

You send your newsletter, and within seconds a few people unsubscribe. Not after reading it: before anyone could have read it. If those addresses belong to companies rather than personal inboxes, the person did nothing. Their company's email security did it for them.

What is happening

Many businesses run security software on their email. To protect staff from phishing, it opens every link in an incoming email before the person sees it, and checks where each one leads. Your unsubscribe link is a link like any other. If opening it is enough to unsubscribe someone, the scanner unsubscribes your reader the moment the email arrives.

How to spot it

• Unsubscribes that arrive within seconds of delivery.
• The same reader "clicking" every link in the email in the same second.
• Mostly company addresses, rarely personal ones.

We saw exactly this on a real client's first send: eleven people unsubscribed in the seconds after delivery, each one alongside a click on every other link in the email at the same moment. No person clicks like that.

The fix: make the link ask

Scanners follow links. They do not press buttons. So the unsubscribe link should open a page that asks, with a button that confirms. A person who wants out presses it and is gone in one tap. A scanner opens the page, finds nothing to follow, and moves on.

Keep the one-click unsubscribe that inboxes show next to your name. That button works differently: the inbox itself sends the request when the reader presses it, so it is safe from scanners and it is required for bulk senders anyway.

Treat click counts with care too

The same scanners inflate your clicks. A burst where one reader clicks every link at once is a machine, not interest. When you judge what worked in a newsletter, look past those bursts.

What about the people already unsubscribed?

You cannot quietly resubscribe them yourself. Even if a machine pressed the link, the record now says they left, and putting them back without their say is exactly what inboxes and privacy laws are built to stop. If you know who they are, invite them to sign up again.

In Vivre, opening the unsubscribe link only asks. Nobody is unsubscribed until a person presses the button. Read the questions people ask first.