Your message does not contain a List-Unsubscribe header

So glad to see this post! I’ve been fretting over the whole “List-Unsubscribe header” issue, based on Mail Tester results, for 6 weeks or longer.

I have always had an unsubscribe link top / center on the header of every email. So I was really stumped on how the results were stating that I didn’t have one.

So then, I thought well I must have it coded incorrectly . . . ugggg

Lots of wasted hours on that one.

Any chance you guys are working on the remedy for this false-positive response? — That will, no doubt, save others from losing hours over trying to figure it out 🙂

Again, thank you for this post!! . . . whew!

@wysija @sleepbear and @leopard-lady this is far from beeing a false positive. Just look at the full source code of any e-mail from Mailpoet.

The List-Unsubscribe: <<em>Unsubscribe-URL</em>> header is simply not existent!

This makes mailings from Mailpoet not compliant with the bulk sender guidelines from Google or any other big provider and effectively reduces the acceptance rate as well as reducing the sending mail servers reputation.
Considering this guidelines are around for over 10 years or so and even the most real spam complies with them this is a really bad habit for a plugin that also has an extremely high priced pro version suggest the people maintaining it at least know the basics about their field of work 😡

And speaking of it a Precedence: bulk header is missing as well…

@wysija (and @sleepbear @leopard-lady @galfom fyi)

the whole List-Unsubscribe thing is way more complex than just adding the unsubscribe URL to the email header

…

This should be implemented on the sender level.

No it’s not and the List-Unsubscribe header has nothing to do with the sender level (how should the technical sender know the unsub link or list id?). What has to be done on sender level is DKIM signing and having a DNS setup with valid SPF, DKIM pub key and DMARC records so that the mails pass all these test. But every decent third party mail provider (and even really cheap webspace provider) have this nowadays.

If you are saying otherwise and are even so bold to claim it would only be possible with your own sending service than this is a really cheap marketing scheme to get people to pay even more for your already expensive plugin. Not to mention that it really shows the low expertise you seem to have which disqualifies MailPoet for professional use.

Oh and by the way, I was able to make MailPoet mails compliant to all guidelines mentioned here https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#unsub (you should read it too, maybe you’ll learn something) in under 5 minutes by just hacking in about 3 lines around line 970 in wysija-newsletters/inc/phpmailer/class.phpmailer.php. If you wanted to and gave it a little more time I’m sure you could do it nicely in your code without modding PHPMailer directly.

@wysija I don’t but one of my clients – who will now obviously not get the pro version of your plugin.
And interesting that you now resort to sarcastic comments instead of staying on topic… I hope this works out for you.

@mailpoet thanks for the decent answer that suits a thread ranking #1 on Google for this topic already better than the previous ones.

Regarding your first point: This is true and never was in disputed. Still my client in question is/was working at the subscriber limit of MailPoet and reached a total amount of outbound mails per week where I prohibit him from further sending mails which are not conform to common bulk guidelines. I guess this is logical for everybody who cares about the reputation of his sending infrastructure.

As these guidelines are not too hard to meet I don’t really see a problem here even if you only have a small team if you know what you are doing. If you are trying to improve things in v3 I’d like to encourage you to also add the Precedence: bulk and List-ID: ID header (if you haven’t already), again it’s really not that hard.

Regarding the general topic on Freemium models and me being a little salty in this conversation. I totally see the benefits of this concept and there are a lot of good products which use it. However I sometimes have the feeling they lack a certain quality as their development process seems to me like this: 1) Some guys who can code a little meet and want to do a yet-another-software project but better. 2) As they cannot compete with the professional solutions on the market they start of as free software. 3) Because they are free and really do things better (most times regarding UX) they get users. 4) They now want to earn something as well and start to offer premium models ranging in the same price range as the previous available professional solutions but are still somewhat stuck on the technical niveau from step 1) of “can code a little”.
And now the evil consultant / system house guy comes and tells his client to switch to another solution as even the pro version of the client’s beloved free software will not do.

But at least I tried and from the looks of it you are trying, too, so maybe future users will get happy.

PS: And obviously my client’s requirements cannot be met anymore with “really cheap, if not free” solutions and if clients would listen to me in the beginning they wouldn’t even start with Freemium if it’s likely they exceed the limits within one year – with one exception in the newsletter segment which I will not call to at least keep this free of competitor advertisement 😉