Orphaned email addresses

  • Resolved samoreen

    (@samoreen)


    3 years, 6 months ago

    Hi,

    I have just discovered a minor (I don’t want to say severe) problem with the way subscriptions are managed in STC. As far as I have correctly understood the way STC stores a user’s subscriptions, they are created as posts describing a relationship between a given email address and categories. However, this approach has drawbacks.

    Let’s assume that a user changes his email address in his profile. The existing subscriptions being tied to the previous email address, these subscriptions are now orphaned. If the user subscribes again to the same categories, notifications will be sent to both addresses (which is what just happened to one of our users).

    The only way to fix this is to ask an admin to delete the STC subscriber entry related to the previous email address. OK. But if this happens for many users, this may have consequences :

    – numerous duplicate notifications will increase the number of superfluous emails sent by the mass mailing service (not our case, though).

    – if the previous address has become invalid, this will generate errors in services like Mailgun or similar. If this happens too often or for too many addresses, this may affect the sender’s reputation and statistics.

    IMHO, the subscribed categories should be tied to the user id, not to the email address which is an information that may change at any time. This change should not affect the user’s choices regarding subscriptions.

    Or did I miss something ?

    Patrick

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  • Plugin Author vandestouwe

    (@vandestouwe)

    An email address itself can not be changed. If the subscriber has a new email address the subscriber himself has to delete the old email address by unsubscribing.

    Admin users can change the email address field but have to realise they factually create a new subscription. Admin users have to unsubscribe the old subscription.

    Non admin logged in users cannot change the email address field. It is read only.

    Non loged in users can only create new subscription or update/unsubscribe an existing subscription. All non logged in actions are sending a confirmation email to the email address of the subscription.

    If an subscriber noticed that he has two subscription he/she can unsubscribe by using the email address. If this email address is obsolete only a logged in admin user can unsubscribe.

    The only point that I think is valid to check on a regular basis if subscription emails are existing. I will check if a free email check is available.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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