How does unsubscribing subscribers work?
If a subscriber unsubscribes via the unsubscribe link in your newsletter or via the web interface of Gmail or Outlook.com, that subscriber is immediately removed from your list of active subscribers. You can only send newsletters to active subscribers. When unsubscribing, your subscriber can also provide a reason.
In addition, you can unsubscribe subscribers yourself, for instance if someone has unsubscribed by sending you an email.
Where do you find unsubscribed subscribers?
In the overview of your subscribers (via Subscribers → Browse), an unsubscribed subscriber moves from the ‘active’ tab to the ‘unsubscribed’ tab.
A third tab, ‘cleaned’, is not about unsubscribing, but about delivery: addresses that result in bounces end up here, for instance because they no longer exist. An address with a hard bounce is also placed on the global blocklist. You can read what is shown under each tab in the overview of active, unsubscribed and cleaned subscribers.
Unsubscribing a subscriber yourself
Here is how you can manually remove someone from your list:
There is an important difference between unsubscribing and deleting. You can still restore a deleted subscriber for 30 days; after that, the data is permanently lost. An unsubscribed subscriber remains on the ‘unsubscribed’ tab, unless you have configured a retention period, and can be activated again later.
If you are doing a larger clean-up, for example of subscribers who have not opened or clicked anything for a while, segmenting based on campaign results is faster. You can read about this under Cleaning up inactive subscribers. An automation can also unsubscribe subscribers, using the Unsubscribe action.
Reactivating an unsubscribed subscriber
You can add an unsubscribed subscriber back to your active subscribers. On the ‘unsubscribed’ tab, tick the box in front of the subscriber. You will then get the option to activate or delete the subscriber.
You may only reactivate a subscriber if you have (once again) received explicit permission from that subscriber to send them newsletters.
Automatically deleting unsubscribed subscribers
By default, unsubscribed subscribers are kept on the ‘unsubscribed’ tab. Sometimes you may want to delete them anyway, for example because of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).
You can configure this with a retention period. Go to Subscribers → your list → Settings → Retention periods and specify after how many days unsubscribed subscribers should be deleted automatically. If a subscriber unsubscribed themselves, Laposta will subsequently remember an encrypted code of the address, so that it is not subscribed again during an import. You can read what else is erased and what is retained in Retention periods for unsubscribed subscribers.