Monitor: Add unsubscribe link

[danjjohnson]

Related to https://github.com/Automattic/jetpack/issues/712

We should have an 'unsubscribe' link in Monitor emails, so that users can manage their notification preferences, especially useful if they deleted or moved their site before disconnecting Jetpack.

The link should work even if the site is no longer connected.

Suggested by @beaulebens in p7pQDF-1m5-p2

[beaulebens]

Even one step further, this is the sort of link that should probably just have a token in it, and work even if you're logged out.

[macmanx2]

We're starting to get a lot of requests about this, maybe folks were in a rush to launch sites early last year but didn't follow through and thus let them expire.

We shouldn't leave our users feeling like marking the notification emails as Spam is their only option.

[jeherve]

There is already a Manage link, and folks can unsubscribe from there:

Until we add an "Unsubscribe" link, I'd recommend folks to click on that manage link to deactivate Monitor.

cc @macmanx2

[beaulebens]

@jeherve Yep, the problem with that link is that it requires you to be able to log into a WP.com account to change your settings, and I believe that in turn requires that WP.com can talk to your site properly. That means if your site is completely gone/deleted, or you have a communication error, or whatever, then you potentially cannot disable notifications in any way.

[MichaelArestad]

@beaulebens do the notifications come from WordPress.com or from the site itself? I would guess if the site was down, you would be able to turn off monitor notifications from WordPress.com.

I think we need to make the email link more prominent on these emails.

[beaulebens]

The emails come from WordPress.com/Jetpack. Yes you should be able to disable notifications from WordPress.com for sure, and you can, but only if your site is connected/working (oh the irony!). Currently the setting lives here;

https://wordpress.com/settings/security/{site}

But I think some exploration was done (maybe even by you :) ) to move the settings for it over to https://wordpress.com/me/notifications under each site.

The problems with all of the above though are:

1. they require your site to be online and connected (to get it to show up properly in WP.com), and
2. you have to be able to log into WordPress.com to get at them, even to unsubscribe/turn the notifications off.

So, IMHO we need a solution where;

1. we expose and allow interaction with these specific settings, even if a site is offline/having connection problems (as long as it's been connected under your account, and shows up in your site list), and separately;
2. a special tokenized URL where we can send people even if they're logged out, and it will force turn off settings for the email address/account where they received the monitor notification (see below)

For #2 above, what I mean is that you'd be able to do something like;

• Monitor checks a site, sees it offline
• Monitor checks notification preferences for that site, and sees that user1 should receive a notification
• Monitor sends an email to user1, containing a special unsubscribe link
• user1 receives email, but doesn't want them any more, so they click the link at the bottom
• user1 is on a brand new device, from which they've never logged in to WordPress.com before
• The link they clicked takes user1 to a URL which immediately disables notifications for user1, based on data contained in the URL (without requiring them to log in or anything).
• Can provide the option to "manage your preferences" or something from there, which would require user1 to log into their WordPress.com account to continue.

[georgestephanis]

Working on this at phab diff D11065-code

[dmsnell]

also, how about we just stop sending those after a certain time. I can't imagine going a month of having a site down and having received emails already about it and still finding the email useful

[beaulebens]

also, how about we just stop sending those after a certain time

Good call. There's a last_status_change in the DB that we could use and just not send (and then maybe turn off monitoring?) if it's too long ago.

[macmanx2]

Folks might be afk and not checking email, and thus we don't want to flood their inboxes. What if we adopted something like:

1. Regular emails for the first 24 hours.
2. A "your site is still down" daily email for anything past 24 hours.
3. A "your site is still down" weekly email for anything past a week.
4. Emails stop after 4 weeks.

[rickybanister]

That sounds sensible to me.

[andrewspittle]

A strong +1 from me to what @macmanx2 and @dmsnell mention above. I just got 3 emails within the course of an hour for a site that no longer (and hasn't for a while) had Jetpack installed or connected. I had to get @chaselivingston to disconnect the emails manually.

[enejb]

I have a PR that fixes this issue by making sure that we never contact sites that have been marked as disconnected. D15960-code

[macmanx2]

That doesn't quite fix it, I don't think. The majority of the complaints we receive are from people who canceled their hosting and domain, but never disconnected Jetpack. For example, emails like "Of course my site is down, I didn't renew it, please stop emailing me."

Every time I've gone through the steps for these users, I have also found that their account still has a Jetpack connection for the site.

[enejb]

There is a mechanism that add the is_disconnected sticker for a site after 30 days of not talking to us. Or if we to a successful call to the site 5 time but don't get a good response. You can also set the sticker in a site's RC. (at the very bottom)

Although not perfect, it should clear up sites that are still getting the emails from us even though we know the sites are disconnected.

[enejb]

We already have code in place that deactivates monitor for sites that are disconnected and do not have any users.

[macmanx2]

I still suspect we'll get some from users who cancel their site and their domain gets moved to an unstable parking page right after (like SiteGround does).

In that case, those users would have to wait for the automated system to disconnect their site, meanwhile they'll continue to get emails that they can't unsubscribe from, and will likely start marking them as spam (which will eventually get our Monitor emails blacklisted again).

If I'm misunderstanding that, please let me know.

[enejb]

@macmanx2 You are right. Having to wait a month is not a great solution before we stop sending emails completely.

I think this could work really well in parallel with @georgestephanis solution with the email links.

[kraftbj]

Having it stop after a month is better than nothing, so 👍 this idea.

[aheckler]

Another scenario to consider: if someone deletes their WP.com account altogether, we should probably disable Monitor across the board for all their sites.

[enejb]

I just got a reply ticket from a user that wasn't able to remove stop the emails after disabled the site. 2547083-zen

I did a bit of testing and when the user clicks the settings button is the following:

• the settings screen loads which shows the user all the security settings. They have to scroll down to the monitor settings.
• Once there they are not able to change the monitor settings. Since the site is ofline.

I think the ideal flow here should provide the user with a choice.

1. Disconnect your site. This is for cases where they deleted the site.
2. Disable monitor emails. (they just want less noise)