Technically, how does "Unsubscribes from Email" work?

[Casey_Grimes]

Something I had never thought about much has come up as an issue and I was hoping someone could help shed a little more light on this.

I've moved from having Unsubscribe HTML/Text globally defined to using {{system.unsubscribeLink}} inside an email template. This works just fine and, because the behavior is not default (no form passing--one click unsubscribe), I have a smart campaign that manually flips the record to Unsubscribed. What I'm curious about is how Marketo uses the trigger and filter for Unsubscribe(d|s) from Email. Does it determine this via the form fillout itself or just via the click? While I realize I can just as soon set up workaround filters/triggers for visiting web page in conjunction with an email, I'm curious to know what the actual criteria is for the system default trigger and filter.

[Anonymous]

I'd also like to know the answer to this as I couldn't find any information on exactly how it works.

How exactly does the trigger "Unsubscribed from Email" know which email they clicked unsubscribe from and how will this change when we implement an email preference center.

[Elliott_Lowe1 · Accepted solution]

We encountered this issue ourselves when setting up an email preference center.  Initially we did not use the Unsubscribe field in our form and set it via a smart campaign based on the value they chose in a drop-down list in a Subscription Preference field.  However, the Unsubscribed from Email filter is based on the Unsubscribe field being in the form on the landing page that is linked to from the 'Change email preferences / Unsubscribe' option in your email, so none of the leads that unsubscribed were included in that filter.  We added the Unsubscribe field back to our form and the Unsubscribed from Email filter included these leads.