Clarifications about mailings

Question

This is a follow-up to https://support.soscisurvey.de/?qa=20940/clarifications-on-multi-wave-survey and https://support.soscisurvey.de/?qa=20935/mailing-limitations.

A couple of clarifications regarding email sending:

1. We want to send 4 different emails. One of the emails has a link pointing to a 3rd party website that has nothing to do with SoSci. The SERIAL is included as a parameter in the link using the %serial% wildcard. We need this in order to display personalised visualisations in the 3rd party website based on data retrieved via the SoSci API. I tested this and it seems to be working. There are no other links in the email pointing to SoSci. Can you please confirm that this is not a problem? E.g. our emails will not be considered spam from your side. (I know that you cannot track the status in the list of contacts this way but that's fine)
2. Is it possible to somehow include an 'unsubscribe' link in the emails which upon clicking removes the corresponding email from our list of contacts?

Many thanks

Answer 1

There are no other links in the email pointing to SoSci. Can you please confirm that this is not a problem?

That is not a problem. We usually trust in our users and that you won't abuse SoSci Survey for sending spam. And given tens of thousands of projects every years, there are always some uncommon applications that we had not considered earlier :)

Is it possible to somehow include an 'unsubscribe' link in the emails which upon clicking removes the corresponding email from our list of contacts?

This is automatically embedded in every mailing from www.soscisurvey.de. If you're sending from another server, you can use the placeholder %opt-out% to provide such a link. The opt-out URL is also embedded in the emails, so that some email programs (such as Google) display a separate opt-out button.

Comments

Wow, that was fast!

In my tests the opt-out was not included automatically but maybe this is because the emails are sent from s2survey.net?

%opt-out% works fine though, so everything is ok.

Many thanks

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> maybe this is because the emails are sent from s2survey.net?

Yes - as this is the paid server, we have disabled the automatic footer in mailings there. If someone abused the mailing feature on that server, we have a valid bank account to send the police to ;)

This is the default footer on www.soscisurvey.de (HTML version):

<p>This e-mail was sent using SoSci Survey (<a href="https://www.soscisurvey.de/en/contact">details</a>). For information about content and privacy please contact <a href="mailto:%email%">%name%</a>.</p>

<p>If you do not want to receive further e-mails via SoSci Survey, please click <a href="%lock%">here</a>.</p>

As you see, I mixed up %opt-out% and %lock%, whereas the latter may be more approprite for your needs.

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I tried both %opt-out% and %lock% but I don't really see any difference between the two, the generated links are identical.

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In that case, I assume we made them aliases a while ago. I did not check the code in detail, but if they have the same output, you can use them both.