Email notifications and spam complaints

Over the past few weeks, we've seen a growing number of Tender email notifications marked as spam. Yesterday, a single user marked over 1,200 Tender emails as spam. In 2009, the user subscribed to receive emails from a category in a Tender site they used to get customer support.

Spam complaints are as bad for us as they are for each of our customers. The risk of being flagged as spam affects the quality of our service and the reputation of our mail provider, Postmark, who has been working with us to prevent future spam complaints.

To address the problem, we've purged users' category subscriptions across Tender. Users will no longer receive email notification from categories. This does not affect discussions they are involved with or watching. Supporter subscriptions have been left intact, so your support workflow through email has not be changed.

Tender isn't just a customer support system, it's a community portal for many products and services. Subscribing to a category is entirely up to the user. We believe our new methods will make email notifications easier to unsubscribe from.

In all user emails, we've replaced the footer with an unsubscribe link:

To unsubscribe and stop receiving emails from http://support.yoursite.com, visit  
http://support.yoursite.com/unsubscribe/4c977b5cd8c4c4ff82a07b13077f7980a

In addition to the unsubscribe link in email notifications, the user profile UI will be getting an update, warning users of what they will be subscribing to and show an estimate of how many emails they will receive per day.