Campaign: Recipients exclusion from from emails triggered by One-Click Unsubscribe
This article describes a scenario in Adobe Campaign Classic where recipients appear to be excluded from email deliveries even though they are not present in address-level quarantine or suppression tables. The issue can occur when a one-click unsubscribe implementation unintentionally sets the global recipient blacklist flag instead of an email-channel-specific opt-out flag.
Description description
A customer observed that some recipients were being excluded from email deliveries even though:
- the email address was not present in the non-deliverables or quarantine tables,
- no suppression-list entry existed for the address,
- typology rules did not show custom exclusion logic related to the issue, and
- the platform appeared to be processing deliveries normally for other recipients.
Investigation showed that the affected recipients were not failing during delivery. Instead, they were being ignored during targeting because the recipient record had the global blacklist flag enabled:
nms:recipient.@blackList = 1
In Adobe Campaign Classic, when the global blacklist flag is set, the recipient is treated as do not contact on any channel. During delivery preparation, this global flag takes precedence and causes the recipient to be excluded from email deliveries, even if the channel-specific email blacklist flag is not set.
The issue was traced to a custom one-click unsubscribe implementation. The unsubscribe logic called:
nms.subscription.Unsubscribe(ctx.vars.service, ctx.recipient)
When this function is executed with an empty or undefined service name, Adobe Campaign Classic interprets it as a global unsubscribe and sets the recipient-level blacklist flag. As a result, recipients can become globally blacklisted instead of being unsubscribed only from email or from a specific service.
Resolution resolution
The resolution is to update the unsubscribe implementation so that it does not trigger a global blacklist unintentionally.
Use one of the following approaches:
- Set only the email-specific blacklist flag. Update the custom unsubscribe process to mark the recipient as opted out for email only, instead of setting the global blacklist.
- Pass a valid service name when using nms.subscription.Unsubscribe(). If the intended behavior is a service-level unsubscribe, ensure the service context is correctly populated before calling the unsubscribe method.
- Validate the web application or unsubscribe flow. Review the one-click unsubscribe web application and confirm that the service variable is initialized correctly in all execution paths.
- Confirm the result in recipient and exclusion history. Check whether affected recipients were excluded because of the global blacklist flag rather than quarantine, suppression, or typology rules.
If recipients are unexpectedly excluded from email deliveries in Adobe Campaign Classic, and address-level quarantine or suppression checks are clean, verify whether the global recipient blacklist flag has been set. A common cause is a custom one-click unsubscribe flow that calls nms.subscription.Unsubscribe() without a valid service name, which results in a global unsubscribe instead of a channel-specific opt-out.