Using subscription management

Amazon SES provides a subscription management capability, in which Amazon SES automatically enables the unsubscribe links in every outgoing email when you specify the contactListName and topicName within ListManagementOptions in the SendEmail operation request.

If a contact unsubscribes from a particular topic or list, Amazon SES does not allow email sending to the contact for that topic or list in the future.

Note

• Amazon SES subscription management supports Bulk Sender Requirements as enforced by many email service providers, see Section 2 in An Overview of Bulk Sender Changes for more information.

• Subscription management is available for those using Easy DKIM in Amazon SES, but it’s not possible for Amazon SES to add the unsubscribe links to your email for senders who are signing emails themselves before calling Amazon SES.

For information about list management and how to use it, including retrieving a list of all your contacts who have subscribed to a particular topic, see Using list management.

Subscription management overview

You should consider the following factors when you use subscription management:

• Subscription management will be fully managed by Amazon SES. This means that Amazon SES receives unsubscribe emails and requests from the unsubscribe webpage and then updates the contact’s preference in your list. You can receive unsubscribe notifications using configuration set notifications. For more information about configuration sets, see Using configuration sets in Amazon SES.

• You need to specify the contact list while sending the email. Subscription management via the List-Unsubscribe header and ListManagementOptions footer links will be handled accordingly.

• Amazon SES adds support for the List-Unsubscribe header standards, which will enable email clients and inbox providers to display an unsubscribe link at the top of the email if they support it - not all email service providers support these headers.

• List-Unsubscribe headers follow the following behavior:

  • If a contact clicks the unsubscribe link in an email which has both the contact list and topic specified, then the contact will be unsubscribed only from that specific topic.

  • If the topic is not specified, then the contact will be unsubscribed from all the topics in the list.

• Contacts will be taken to an unsubscribe landing page when they click an unsubscribe link in the email footer.

• The unsubscribe landing page will give contacts an option to update their preferences, meaning OPT_IN or OPT_OUT, for all the topics in a particular list. The landing page also gives an option to unsubscribe from all topics in the list.

• If using ListManagementOptions, you must include the {{amazonSESUnsubscribeUrl}} placeholder in your emails to indicate where Amazon SES needs to insert the unsubscribe URL. You can include the placeholder two times maximum. If used more than two times, only the first two occurrences are replaced.

• The List-Unsubscribe header and ListManagementOptions footer links are added only if the email is being sent to a single recipient.

• For transactional emails where you don't want contacts to be able to unsubscribe, you can omit the ListManagementOptions field with your SendEmail request.

Unsubscribe header considerations

Subscription management through an unsubscribe link is enabled when the email contains the following headers:

List-Unsubscribe

List-Unsubscribe-Post

When you use Amazon SES's subscription management, ListManagementOptions, Amazon SES will override these headers if they are present in the email.

Recipients who unsubscribe by clicking the link produced by these headers will have a different experience depending on their email client or inbox provider because some providers do not recognize the List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post headers; email sent to recipients using such providers will not see the Unsubscribe link.

Recipients whose email client recognizes these headers will see the Unsubscribe link and will be able to unsubscribe via the link but will not have the option of choosing which topics they unsubscribe from, and will simply be unsubscribed from the topic to which the email was sent.

For more information about the List-Unsubscribe header, see RFC 2369, and for the List-Unsubscribe-Post header, see RFC 8058.

Note

Amazon SES supports one-click unsubscribe in accordance with Bulk Sender Requirements as enforced by many email service providers, see Using one-click unsubscribe with Amazon SES for more information.

Adding an unsubscribe footer link

You will need to use the {{amazonSESUnsubscribeUrl}} placeholder in templated and non-templated emails to specify where Amazon SES needs to insert the unsubscribe URL.

Placeholder replacement is supported only for HTML and TEXT content types.

You can include the placeholder two times maximum. If used more than two times, only the first two occurrences are replaced.

Note

The {{amazonSESUnsubscribeUrl}} placeholder can only be used if ListManagementOptions is specified as a header while using the SendEmail operation or X-SES-LIST-MANAGEMENT-OPTIONS is specified as a header while using the SMTP interface. (Not to be confused with the List-Unsubscribe or List-Unsubscribe-Post headers which are not dependent on ListManagementOptions and can be used by themselves.)