The discussion revolves around the challenges of using Elastic Email with Discourse, primarily due to its mandatory unsubscribe link and physical address in email footers, which conflict with Discourse’s own unsubscribe system. Users express frustration over the inability to remove or customize these elements, leading to a disconnect between Discourse’s user management and Elastic Email’s suppression lists mmiada, tophee. While Elastic Email allows disabling the unsubscribe link for certain users, this requires direct coordination with their support dandv. The thread also highlights integration issues, such as the lack of webhook support for bounce handling, and questions the continued recommendation of Elastic Email given these limitations cmwebdev. A pull request was submitted to update the documentation, and another to remove Elastic Email entirely due to its restrictive free tier and integration problems JonasD. However, Elastic Email has since offered to disable the unsubscribe link for Discourse users, provided their emails are generated through Discourse dandv, merefield.
hi,
i’m using elastic email for delivery (from your recom.)
but i can’t remove unsubscribe link from elastic email (i think because is mandatory)
from what i read is a way to merge some how. they give this doc
how can i solve this? i this many discourse users have elastic email, maybe have also a solution.
plus i need user to unsubscribe from discourse link not from elastic link.
thank you very much.
If you’re certain the link is being added by Elastic, you’ll need to contact Elastic for help removing the unsubscribe link. We (Discourse) can’t help with that.
Hi Joshua
Elastic Email, one of your recommended email services, will always add an unsubscribe link at the end of any mail sent through their service in order to comply with anti spam legislation. There is no way that this can be disabled, not even by contacting support.
It is clear that managing unsubscribes in a separate application (i.e. Elastic Email) is not really a great option. I think what @mmiada meant, and I would like to ask as well, is the following:
Does Discourse provide any way to disable all emails for a given user by making a http request to Discourse from an external application, with the email address of the unsubscribing user as a parameter? This would allow any unsubscribes coming from Elastic Email to disable mailing for the unsubscribing user, because Elastic Email offers this capability in their system:
The Elastic Email http notification specification is documented here.
I’m not sure personally, you’d need another engineer to confirm. Perhaps @zogstrip knows.
The only unsubscribe route we have takes an “unsubscribe key” as parameter.
But we do support webhooks for our other recommended email services. I’m open to a PR adding support for Elastic Email 
As far as I understand, that would only partially solve the problem because if users re-subscribed to mails from their Discourse profile, this would fail (they’d need to resubscribe with ElasticMail). I’m not sure there is a good solution to this 
@allu Is it possible to hide the address though? I don’t mind having the unsubscribe button but the address of my elasticmail account shows everytime an email is sent.
+1 for removing address from footer. Is there any way to do it at least?
@Majedsam did you manage to remove it?
What a bummer. It really looks like you can’t send a single email through elastic email without an unsubscribe link at the bottom. (In my case, they’re also adding my address. But I haven’t investigated whether the address can be removed).
In any case, I think this should disqualify elastic email as an officially recommended email provider for discourse. It’s unusable like that. And 30 minute install wont work if you have to go back and reconfigure your email…
What’s that? You should be able to run ./discourse-setup again and just enter new mail settings.
Well, yes. Or just edit the app.yml and rebuild (which takes time). And what takes even more time is setting up a mailgun account and setup the DNS records accordingly.
I see. My setup script configures mallgun, and if you use digital ocean’s dns servers, the dns and mallgun activation.
I’m with Hetzner and Google domains…
Anyway, my point was just that I see no reason why elasticemail is on the list. It’s misleading.
Looks like mailgun is the only way to go if you want free emails for a smaller forum…
Mallgun is what I recommend, actually, require, for my $99 desk customers.
Can you remove it if you pay for the service, at least?
no, you can’t, is mandatory.
I asked them if I misunderstood something and here is what they answered:
All email sent through the account requires an Elastic Email {unsubscribe} merge tag. You can learn how to add this link to your emails here: https://elasticemail.com/support/user-interface/unsubscribe/#Unsubs
Additional information regarding this is located here: https://elasticemail.com/resources/templates/merge-fields/
If you do not add an {unsubscribe} tag to your emails, our system will automatically place an “UNSUBSCRIBE” link at the bottom of your email.
All email is also required to have your profile’s physical address information. Please see details here:
https://elasticemail.com/resources/account/email-compliance-merging…If you would like to customize the placement or formatting of this information you can use the merge tag {accountaddress}.
Although it’s an old subject, let me let here a solution for other people searching the answer to the question. You can change the unsubscribe link adding a merge field or the link. Something like
{unsubscribe:{unsubscribe_link}} (where unsubscribe_link is the merge field) or
{unsubscribe: http://yourdomain.com/unsusbscribe_or_something_similar/ }
Source: https://elasticemail.com/resources/guides/unsubscribe/
Is there a general unsubscribe link which can be used with cookies then?
Why do people still keep trying to use Elasticmail? Could it be because it is still being offically recommended?
