Do not re-subscribe updated email addresses by default

[Casey_Grimes]

Imagine this scenario:

1. Person A is listed in your Marketo database as person.a@company.com.

2. Person A unsubscribes.

3. Company.com gets acquired; now all their emails are person.a@conglomo.com

4. You update Person A's email address to keep good hygiene--maybe sales will do a one on one email with them sometime.

5. Marketo sees the email address change and re-subscribes Person A.

While I would expect flags to be reset on say, invalid email, with an email address change, the Unsubscribe field is almost always used as a person-centric way of noting whether to mail someone or not. By resetting this field by default, you wind up emailing Person A when they've already told you they don't want to receive anything. Current Marketo behavior automatically re-subscribes the person and requires you to create a Smart Campaign to fix this. This should be the other way around; if you want to re-subscribe someone who's unsubscribed, you should have to do that through actions.

Please change this behavior so the record ​stays unsubscribed​.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Fully agreed this is especially dangerous in the GDPR Era...

Added here: Marketo GDPR Compliance-a summary of key ideas

-Greg

[Justin_Cooperm2]

Thanks for identifying this. We will work on a resolution ASAP.

[Casey_Grimes]

So, I wanted to post an update to this idea because it's been sitting with the "Working On It Now" label on it for over a year. 

I recently checked in on the instance that originally found this issue because I noticed the trigger for it had been automatically deactivated—and it turns out there hadn't been any more occurrences of this behavior since August 2018. Out of curiosity, I recreated the issue again and this time the record stayed unsubscribed upon changing the email address.

This bug looks like it's resolved. Someone from the Marketo side should mark this as Done! to get some credit for accepting user feedback. Thanks, whoever fixed this.