I know, there are many Newsletter Tools out there: from WordPress plugins to free online services – basically you wouldn’t need to buy a Newsletter tool if you just want to send out some newsletter every now or then. But then there are also websites with other demands – and those demands may call for a professional tool.

My tool-of-choice is the so called Email Marketer be Interspire. It’s a rather complex system, but it’s flexible and reliable – yet affordable. I like it – and as far as I know many of my clients like it too.

The pre-defined variables are one great feature in Interspire’s Email Marketer. Adding the unsubscribe-variable / short code “%unsubscribelink%” enables users to unsubscribe from the newsletter mailing list with just one click. That is great – but sometimes one click is not enough – or actually just a little bit ‘too much’ convenience. So you might want to make that two clicks, to avoid unintended accidental unsubscriptions.

Adding an additional step to the one-click-undsubscribe-function to make it a two-click-unsubscribe is not as easy as 1-2-3 –– but it is very well possible. All you basically need to do is add a variable to the variable “unsubscribelink” and twist the “unsubscribe.php” a little bit – that means adding about 2-3-4 lines of code to to the “unsubscribe.php” like this:

<?PHP 
$this_url = explode("&ok",$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);

if ((sizeof($this_url)>1)&&($_GET['ok']=="ok")) {

// here goes the 'regular' unsubscribe code 

} else { 

$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];

$signoff = $_GET['ok'];

$this_url = explode("&ok",$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);

$this_url = $this_url[0];

?>

Are you sure you want to be unsubscribed from the list?
<a href="<?PHP echo($this_url); ?>&ok=ok">YES, take me off the list</a>

<?PHP } ?>

So in the “unsubscribe.php” I first check the URL for the variable “ok” – and if it’s set to “ok” then I continue with the unsubsribe-process. If the variable is however not set to “ok” yet, then I show a link so that the user can confirm his/her un-subscription by clicking that link. This has reduced the amount of unwanted unsubscriptions by nearly 100%. Yay!

Ha! Update: here is also an even easier fix for that problem:
https://www.interspire.com/forum/showthread.php?t=17207