"Transactional Emails" Not Available For Toggle in Web Interface

Bug Reports
1

I was frustrated with receiving unwanted emails through iNaturalist, of the sort “New updates (date)…” and I used the unsubscribe link in the email, which turned them off.

Unfortunately, the link to configure email notifications in my profile / account settings:

https://www.inaturalist.org/people/1450803/edit#notifications

Does not show this option anywhere. This seems a major oversight, because it was the first place I went to try to turn off these notifications.

Also, I have my email client configured to display emails in a text-only format, which I do for privacy, security, and spam reduction purposes. The unsubscribe link is presented in such a way that it is not isolated or separated, and thus neither easy to click nor to copy-and-paste, instead being enclosed in “<” “>” characters. It is also EXTRAORDINARILY long. Like it takes up a whopping 6 lines of text. This looks really ugly and is annoying to copy and paste.

The email also links to the following link:

http://www.inaturalist.org/users/edit

With the caption “Update subscription preferences” but this is misleading and leads to poor user experience, because it doesn’t take you directly to the page where you can update preferences, instead you need to click another button (“Notifications”) and because it doesn’t say email, it isn’t immediately clear which one to click.

I think this situation could be improved in multiple ways:

(1) Make the unsubscribe link shorter
(2) Make the unsubscribe link appear in isolation and be clearly visible in a text-only email format
(3) Make the email link directly to the single URL that configures email preferences without forcing the user to then figure out where to click and click a second link on that page
(4) Make the email preferences page show toggles for ALL the email types.

I am reporting this as a “bug” and not a feature request because unwanted emails are an imposition and because we, the subscribers, hold power over you in that we can at any time choose to report emails as spam. I have chosen not to do this, because I want to support iNaturalist, but I find that the difficulty of unsubscribing from emails is a major imposition and a violation of basic trust as a user.

It’s always important to err on the side of respecting the user’s privacy and making it as easy as possible to unsubscribe.

2

Here is a screenshot of the page that was reached when I clicked the unsubscribe link, showing a type of email not covered on the other page linked:

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3

I’m a little unclear by what you mean here, as you definitely can turn off all iNat emails, or only selectively receive certain emails, in your profile settings.

When you go to that link, toggling the third option to ‘yes’ shows you this menu

image
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Is this what you’re referring to or am I misunderstanding your comment?

1 Like
4

this is a strange claim to make; what do you believe would be achieved by reporting these emails as spam, given it is a simple process to stop receiving them, as I noted above?

If you toggle that third switch to no, you will no longer receive any emails regarding notifications or updates. I have it toggled off, and I do not receive any emails.

2 Likes
9

Probably not possible, at least with the current set up. The link is generated by SendGrid, the email service we use.

Something we can look into but I can’t make any promises.

I added a github issue here for the URL: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/transactional-emails-not-available-for-toggle-in-web-interface/39379 I agree it’s not ideal that we currently don’t take you to the correct page in Account Settings.

As @thebeachcomber says, it basically does - those are the “transactional” emails.