Microsoft might have unsubscribed you against your will

As you might know, we send an email newsletter typically once a week every Thursday. The newsletters contain information about new product releases, news about our product development and what we’re up to in general. Sometimes we also include a discount link for one of our products.

However, something very unusual happened Thursday last week.

We sent our newsletter and suddenly thousands of people unsubscribed!

It’s common to see people unsubscribe from a newsletter, even though we always try to offer the most interesting content, it still happens. But not at the rate that we saw last week. Since this is highly unusual and we’ve never seen anything like this, we decided to put our detective hats on and did an investigation involving our mailing provider.

We had two hypotheses:

1. Many people don’t want to receive our newsletters again and they all decided to unsubscribe at the same time
2. There was a peculiar automatic mass unsubscription happening since the majority of the people who mass unsubscribed were using Microsoft email addresses (outlook, MSN, and hotmail domains)

If the first hypothesis applies to you, then there’s nothing to do on your end. All is good. Sorry to see you go, but we understand if you wanted to unsubscribe.

To investigate the hypothesis that something more unusual happened, we first contacted our email service provider SendGrid that we pay to deliver all our emails including the newsletter.

After exchanging many messages with SendGrid, we came to the rather disturbing possibility that it seems like Microsoft decided to automatically unsubscribe everyone using their email address from our newsletter.

To be clear, we are not talking about spam filtering here. Companies like Microsoft and Google have done spam filtering for years, and that’s a good thing! We don’t send spam, so we hate spammers as much as anyone else.

But this is not spam filtering. This looks like Microsoft deciding without user consent that all these users no longer should receive these newsletters. As in, ever. Because that’s exactly what it looks like happened: Microsoft didn’t just use a spam filter to block a single email we sent, but they actually clicked the unsubscribe link that we naturally include in every newsletter we send!

If you think you might have been automatically unsubscribed, or you just want to ensure you will receive our newsletter in the future, please go to our Download page at: https://jv16powertools.com/download and enter your name and email address to the newsletter subscription box.

We’d also like to use this opportunity to remind you that if you change your mind and don’t want to receive newsletters from us anymore, you can always unsubscribe using the link available at the bottom of emails we send. Clicking the unsubscribe link will opt you out of our mailing list and you won’t receive any more communication from us.

Your email client such as Gmail might also have an option to hit the “Report as Spam” button, but we’d implore you to not use it to unsubscribe. It’s because while this option opts you out of our mailing list, it’ll also send reports that we’re spammers. When we’re being reported as spammers, it’ll hurt our email reputation and in turn, newsletters won’t be delivered to people who do want to hear from us.

This is quite similar to refunds. We have a 60-day no-questions-asked refund policy. If you bought any licenses of jv16 PowerTools or WinFindr and for any reason, you’re unhappy with it, you can always send an email to [email protected] to ask for a refund, and we’ll gladly give back 100% of your money, no questions asked. This is a much preferable option other than requesting for chargeback.

Sometimes people would directly contact their bank or credit card company and report the transaction as fraudulent to get their refund. While we understand that this might be a convenient way to do it, it’s very bad for us, because every single time this happens, our payment processor punishes us with a penalty. The customer gets their money back either way, but if you do it this way, we lose money and for small businesses like ours, it hurts the bottom line a lot.

In conclusion, there are two things that we’d love you to consider doing:

• Resubscribe to our newsletter if you think you might have been unsubscribed. You can do it here: https://jv16powertools.com/download – It’s the form with the Start Download button.
• If you want to unsubscribe to our newsletter, please use the “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom of our email instead of using any ‘Report as Spam’ buttons.

Thank you for reading and thank you for your support!